


Monsters

by glacis



Category: X Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-29
Updated: 2010-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:43:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glacis/pseuds/glacis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Monsters Series:  So Many Monsters: Mulder loses his faith, and regains it. Krycek finds his way through the chaos. Alliances are struck and battle is joined. Any Weapon: Krycek returns. Mulder goes undercover. Scully is left behind. Retrieval: an undercover agent is extracted by an unusual team of rescuers (includes the events of the episode "This Is Not Happening").</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters

The Monsters Series:  So Many Monsters, Any Weapon, Retrieval.

_So Many Monsters_

_I used to be a lunatic from the gracious days_

It took weeks for the pain to subside. He didn't waste any of that time. He knew, too soon, he would be recalled to Moscow. He had answers to give his 'superiors', and questions of his own to ask. But as he watched an old man pack clean snow on the ruined stump of his arm, Alex Krycek did as he had been trained to do his entire life. He watched, he listened, he manipulated those around him into giving him what he needed in order to survive.

"They say the injections will save your life, but I do not believe them. It is better this way."

Whispers, in the dark, over low fires, between unlettered peasants, hinting at truths they could never understand.

"Black poison stealing our children."

"Those left. Those who do not disappear with the light, in the middle of the night."

Truths he understood all too well.

"So many gone."

"It used to be a child's tale, told to frighten other children. Now I think the Devil himself has come, with demons at his side. They will take all of us before they are finished."

"And we will no longer be ourselves!"

Krycek was entering a new nightmare.

"They are monsters. Yuri saw one, he said. Before his village was burnt to the ground."

"Yuri's a lunatic."

"Sometimes the truth comes from the mouths of lunatics and children, when adults are too blind to see."

Six months, an assassination, a trip to Hong Kong and another to the States, and a short interval with Fox Mulder later, he made his move. Back to Tunguska. Back where it all began to make sense.

His rank was still in force, and he used it. Within another four months, the networks were in place. A small, deadly cadre of Russian soldiers under his temporary command, for as long as he needed them, and a grass roots intelligence gathering network of rumors, whispers, tales told in the night, from those most in position to know. He listened, and planned, and wove his plans. And when a middle aged woman from Temirtau with a microchip in the back of her neck spoke to him of learning, and expanding, and our friends from above, he knew it was time to put his plans in motion.

_I used to feel woebegone and so restless nights_

The night lasted forever. Fox Mulder, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Psychologist, Profiler. Spooky.

Lost.

For so long, he had held to the security and the strength of his convictions. He knew what had happened to his sister Samantha. He was used to people calling him crazy. There was some truth to that allegation, how could there not be, considering what he had been through, what he knew to be true? He held fast to that truth through years of hell, years of disbelief and scorn, years of distrust and paranoia. He had believed, and the strength of that belief had allowed others to admit that they, too, believed.

He didn't know what to believe anymore.

His nights were filled with images torn from his waking life. Flashing lights, paralyzed helplessness, fascinated horror as his sister floated beyond his grasp. As his partner, the inimitable Dana Scully, was kidnapped, experimented upon, used as a lab rat, with him unable to do a damned thing to stop it. Having to bear the responsibility for that, for her suffering, her barren state, her cancer, all the horrors life at his side had led her to see and experience. His nightmares were part memory, part guilt, part fear, part paranoia, wholly justified.

Now they were changing.

Oh, the lights were still there. But now, a face stood in the shadows. A tall, emaciated man with a cigarette in his hand and a half smile twisting his lips. Blood on his chest, but he was still breathing, thin streams of smoke curling around his head like a demon breathing fire. Beside him, another man, shorter, blockier. His face melted, becoming Scully, becoming a stranger, becoming Krycek, becoming his father, becoming himself. Always, no matter the face, the right hand held steady. Clenched in the fist, a small, metallic cylinder with a short, sharp spike extending from the end. Green viscous fluid dripped along it, sizzling as it puddled on the ground, eating into the asphalt beneath the alien's feet. Further back, in the shadows, there was tank after tank of salty water, embryonic fluid bathing the fetuses within. Curled about themselves, eyes tightly closed, waiting. All of them wore Scully's face.

Then the scene would shift, the lights flashing like a strobe going off behind his eyelids. Scully was there, strapped to a table, her stomach distended under a sheet, a probe drilling through her abdomen, pinning her in place. She was screaming, her mouth wide, but no sound was escaping. He was there, too, on another table. Chicken wire bound him as tightly as an infant in swaddling, biting into his skin, burning his eyeballs, creasing his lips. No sound came from him, either, although his throat strained with the effort. Had to close his mouth, couldn't let it in.

Let it in?

It?

Crawling all over him. Slick, slimy, cool to the touch, with a presence, an intelligence, that was undeniable. Not mindless, but directed. Capture. Takeover. Control. Wisps of black filling his nostrils, clogging his windpipe. Washing over the surface of his eyes. The pressure built, built, until he exploded from the diaphragm, flash-fire arcing through every cell in his body, incinerating him, the table, Scully, the shadows …

His screams woke him.

Staring up at the dim ceiling, just now lightening with the first rays of dawn through the small window over his computer desk, he came to a startling conclusion.

He wasn't mad. But he had been mistaken. For a very long time.

Something inside him tore open and bled at the thought. The loss of conviction left a ragged little hole in his heart. For the moment, the hole was masked by fear and anger, his typical crusader's zeal turned from one course to another with compulsive conviction. But as thoughts swirled around his head, and he decided on a tangential course of action from everything that had gone before, the hole bled.

There was some comfort in an enemy he could see. Had seen, had fought, had considered part and parcel of the conspiracy against him, and now wanted, so desperately, to believe was the whole of the conspiracy. He debuted his radically changed views at a collegiate visiting lecturers panel, and faced once more the anger and dismay of disappointed believers who didn't want to hear what he had to say.

Their disgust stung. He was used to it.

Then Doctor Heintz Werber, the psychologist who had fed and shaped his own forged memories, stepped out from an aisle to block his path, and brought him to meet a new victim of his beliefs. A woman who was convinced that the aliens had not only landed, but wanted to take all the earthlings up in a big hug and teach them any manner of wonderful things. A woman who had been nursing her psychosis for years, bolstered of late by his own deluded ravings. In the strength of his new conviction, he turned away from her.

The hole tore a little further, and the blood flowed.

_My aching heart would bleed for you to see_

The more rumblings Krycek heard, the more the alarm tightened the pit of his stomach. Slowly, carefully, he began to reel in his information, carefully placing each small piece of the puzzle together. As the picture took form, he began to implement what he could of a plan to keep himself in one piece.

He stared around the dimly lit interior of the small peasant hut. Four men, Treplev, Shabelski, Lopakhin and Astrov, huddled around the open fire, warming their hands, drinking their tea, and waiting for orders. He smiled, a friendly widening of the mouth that didn't quite show his teeth. In soft, guttural Russian, he asked for their reports.

"Word is spreading among the villagers," Shabelski offered. His large frame contrasted oddly with the withered stump of his left arm. "They say there will be a gathering, and that God will come and gather them up."

"Again," added Treplev. He was a ferret of a man, small, inquisitive, and surprisingly fearless. "These are the ones who say they've been taken before, say they've seen the face of God."

Lopakhin, the scholarly one, the village teacher, made a thoughtful noise. "Or the Devil, maybe. They talk of lights, and pain, and memories that make no sense. And they speak of a voice that calls out to them, tells them to come."

"Come where?" Krycek asked quietly. Treplev shrugged.

"Astrakhan. Novosibirsk, maybe. Runyy."

"Somewhere in Kazakhstan," Astrov joined the conversation. He was the youngest of the five in years, but one of the oldest in experience. Afghanistan had seen to that. He hadn't needed the peasants to cut off his arm. The Mujahadin had done that for him, with shrapnel from a well-aimed shell. "The talk is getting louder, although it's still in the back rooms, out among the trees, only with those they think they can trust. I've heard Ekibastuz, maybe Semey. Maybe Temirtau."

Krycek nodded. That's where their prophet was. That's where the faithful would gather. Leaning forward slightly, catching his team's eyes, he spoke softly. "It will come soon, and it is sooner than it should be. Something is happening, and we need more information to find out what it will be. Keep your ears open, and stay invisible. When you get anything that points to a date or to one place in particular, get it to me. Fast. We won't have a lot of time, and we have to get there first."

The other men nodded their agreement, tossed the remains of their cold tea into the fire, and headed out into the frigid night. He watched the door shut behind the last broad back before turning to a small cabinet set under the table. Pulling out a short wave radio, he checked the time and set the dials. There was no wait for reception -- she was as anxious as he to find out what was going on.

"News?" Short and to the point. That was his Marita.

"Some. Not much. An area, restless natives. Indications of disorganization and some haste on the part of Our Friends."

"Anything specific?"

"Look to the East," he smiled as he said it. "And there will come a great light."

She didn't bother to reply before cutting the connection. He carefully replaced the set and settled closer to the fire. It wasn't that he didn't trust her. Well, true, he didn't trust her. But he didn't trust anyone, himself included. No, he wanted to get there first. See how fast she got there on his heels. See just how good her own information gathering network had become.

He was not one to surrender trump cards unless they were forced from his hand. And on that front, the oil aliens owed him. Big time.

 

Three days later, Lopakhin strained to listen as two of his young charges were discussing plans overheard from parents late at night. There was a place, and a time, and a meeting settled. He finished putting away his books, and bundled himself up in his coat and muffler.

By four o'clock that afternoon, he was in place, in the heart of a deep stand of trees by the small clearing mentioned by one schoolboy. He breathed shallowly, a hand feathered over his mouth to disperse the steam from his breath. Less than half an hour later, he recognized the fathers of the two boys heading into the clearing.

The meeting was early, it seemed.

Before he could complete the thought, a nightmare vision from hell stepped from the thicket. He opened his mouth instinctively to scream, his horror overcoming his need to remain undiscovered. The face was melted flesh, a mutilated mask atop a huge hulking body. It lifted a pipe, braced its legs, and the world disappeared in flames.

Unremitting pain ate at him as the fire raced over his body. In seconds he was a human torch, echoing the fate of the two other men. Then there was blessed darkness, and nothing.

 

The teacher's disappearance was a nine day wonder in the village. They were used to people disappearing in the dead of night, but had counted themselves safe when they had amputated the Devil's Arm, so the camp soldiers would not take them. Now, with three grown men missing, all previously cut, it appeared that the camp needed more laborers. The people huddled in groups, talking very quietly or not at all. No one went out at night unless it was an emergency, and an emergency like that wasn't about to happen.

Petya Astrov didn't like it. It didn't smell right to his soldier's instincts. There was an enemy threatening the village, and not just from the camp. A week after the three men went missing, he clothed himself in Spetznaz black from his old days, holstered his contraband automatic pistol, and let himself out into the night.

A reconnaissance of the perimeter of the village yielded nothing. Spiraling deeper into the woods, eyes darting in all directions in a disciplined scan for enemies, he penetrated deeper and deeper into the forest. Four kilometers into the wood, he heard it.

Faint. Hissing. Strange. Unlike anything he'd heard before. He froze, going still as a shadow, only his eyes moving.

The hands came out of nowhere.

They wrapped around his throat, cutting off his air. Trained muscles responded with martial precision, but the strength in those hands was inhuman. The world went gray, his gun sliding from his one-handed grip, his legs dangling uselessly.

When the light returned to his eyes, it was through a filter. Iridescent black floaters slid past his pupils, but he wasn't aware of them. His hand dipped toward the ground, searching for the discarded weapon. Before the fingers could make contact, there was a burst of fire from behind him.

Astrov never felt the flame that killed him. The alien inside him did, and it screamed in silent agony as it writhed inside its host body, unable to seep away, immolated too quickly to escape.

A mutilated face watched without eyes as the charred remnants of an alien and its unwilling host crumbled into the moist undergrowth.

It was the price of freedom. And his people would have freedom.

 

Krycek was getting nervous. Time was growing short, he could feel it in his gut, in the short hairs on the back of his neck. They were bristling, telling him he was missing something big, and he didn't have the margin of error he needed to miss this one. He warned his remaining two cohorts to keep themselves as invisible as they could, but to get the information that he needed. At any cost.

They paid.

 

Mikhail Shabelski was used to hiding in plain sight. People, even those who should have known better, saw his placid face and overgrown body much as they might a cow, just one of the livestock, part of the scenery. He was careful to maintain that image of docile stupidity. It had saved him more than once.

Digging away at the nearly barren soil, ostensibly breaking up the stones in the ground to prepare it for planting, he eavesdropped on two women sorting vegetables nearby. They were clearly frightened, not just by the imminent return of god to take them away again, but by the way their menfolk were disappearing around them. They spoke of voices, and his ears pricked.

"It will be soon," one said plainly to the other. "I can feel it, calling me, waking me in the night."

"I feel it, I know," the other agreed. "It's getting stronger. Pulling at me."

They moved beyond his hearing range, and he filed the information away for future report. Needing to hear more of the conversation, feeling he was close to the information they needed, he casually tossed his tools into the basket and wiped his hands on his thighs. Straightening with deceptive slowness, he meandered in their wake. As they passed the baker's shop near the end of the dirt track, he felt a whisper of movement and turned instinctively toward it.

The loop of wire around his neck slit his throat with his own forward motion.

Strong hands dropped the ends of the loop, caught at the back of his jacket and hefted the dead weight into a pile of rubbish behind the rickety row of buildings. There was no way to hide a body this big, but the owner of the hands didn't have time to care. She would be leaving this hole very soon. The old women had given her what she needed to know.

 

The village resembled a ghost town. The disappearances had been unsettling, but not uncommon. A murdered body behind the baker's was something else entirely. Andrei Treplev was working on autopilot, his mind nearly frozen with a combination of uncommon fear and desperate need to find out what the hell was going on with his comrades. Lurking in the corner of the common room at what passed for a pub, he heard it. A name. Astrov had been right. Very early in the morning two days after Shabelski's body was found, he snuck around to the back of Aleksander Krycek's cottage.

"Come in, Andrei Vassilyevich," Krycek invited softly. Treplev slipped in the door and scuttled up to the fire.

"We're the only ones left," he began, and Krycek cut him off with an abrupt gesture before he could continue.

"And even we won't be here much longer if we don't find out what the hell is going on."

"I think I know." He gulped a breath, then continued under the force of Krycek's expectant glare. "It is Kazakhstan." He outlined what he had heard, and Krycek drank it all in. Then a smile crossed his face, and Treblev shook. He never wanted to see that Devil's grin directed at him.

"Good work, my friend. Now, I will take it from here." He stared intensely at Treblev, and the older man barely restrained himself from making the sign of the cross to protect himself. "You must stay here. Continue the work we've begun. There is going to be trouble, and we need all the help we can get when it comes."

Treblev nodded, and Krycek smiled at him again, god help him. Krycek nodded at the door, and he forced his trembling knees to carry him out into the day, breathing deeply. Yes, he could stay here, and he could gather information, and he could prepare the best he could for whatever the military would unleash on them. He had done it all his life.

He would do it until they took his life. He knew no other way to live.

 

It was the work of two telephone calls to Moscow and one personal visit to the gulag at Tunguska, but he had his unit and he had his receptacle. Within the week, he had his gathering.

By the time he got there, he had a hell of a lot of roasted meat and very few answers.

Happily, she got there after he did. Because along with all the dead ones, there was one live one. And the live one was his trump card.

He kissed off Marita, putting on a good show for the blue helmets, gathered up his prize, and headed for Tunguska.

The boy Dmitri was a tough nut. He hadn't wanted to talk, not at all. Krycek had needed to be tougher than the boy, and eventually he had. Of course, there was some residual damage where he'd had to beat the truth out of him, but he had at least some of the answers that he needed. There was indeed something major going on.

Warring groups of aliens. Some containing oil aliens, as he had, as he was now immune to doing. As Mulder had, and was now immune to carrying. Others, holding flame throwers, pre-empting the work of the oil aliens, charring their willing hosts before those hosts could sacrifice themselves on the altar of interstellar good will.

It was a fucking world war on a universal scale. Them versus them with us caught in the middle.

It made his head ache.

He handed the boy to the good doctors at the gulag, determined to safeguard his information the best way he knew how … lock it away as a lab rat where no one would ever hear him scream. As he stepped from the room where the doctor was gently cleaning the boy preparatory to strapping him to a table and pumping him full of alien spoor, his eye was caught by a small vial on the tray by the door.

They had done it. His eyes lit up.

He pocketed one of the vials, stared into the room, and made adjustments to his plan.

Perhaps there was a way to keep his information, and still have something of great worth to barter to his former masters in the Consortium. It was certainly worth the try.

 

Things didn't quite work out the way he'd hoped. They so seldom did.

Krycek managed to contain the alien inside the boy's body by the simple expedient of sewing the facial orifices closed. Then he'd left the unconscious body in the hold, swayed to the head, and vomited. Vision once more clear, now empty stomach willing to face what he had to face, he returned to the hold. Sluicing water gently over the boy, he'd tried to reassure him. Not that it made any difference. He knew from personal experience Dmitri had no knowledge of what was happening to his body. All there was in that filthy hold was a human mule and an alien parasite, frantic to escape and make its way to join the others of its kind. Krycek bided his time and waited until they reached New York.

Marita surprised him. He surprised her in return. They came together with typical animal savagery, doing their damnedest to turn one another inside out. Then the bitch betrayed him. Took his trump card, took his bartering chip. Took the fucking alien trapped in the boy and ran with him.

Things didn't work out quite the way she was expecting, either. After all, there were a lot of things he hadn't told her. Turned out, it was a damned good thing.

Cold water splashed against his face, waking him. It was the Dandy, his own sarcastic nickname for the best dressed of the bunch of bastards who made up the Consortium. They bickered, and bartered, and eventually came to a stumbling halt over the fate of Marita Covarrubias.

"Save her life?" He couldn't believe the old man would expect him to give up the precious vaccine to save the life of that worthless cunt. "After what she did to me?"

There was a nasty little sneer on the old man's face. "To save your own life," he replied coldly.

Krycek thought about it. He knew when he was trapped. But Dmitri and the vial of vaccine weren't his only trump cards. "It will take more than us," he asserted, pushing himself as far upright against the wall as he could with his wrist still shackled to the pipe. "We're going to need other help."

The old man stilled, staring at him measuringly. "What sort of other help?"

"Mulder." The Dandy's face stilled as he thought it over. Krycek pressed his advantage. "I can get him on our side."

The look in those cold eyes showed the old man wasn't convinced. "Agent Mulder appears to have changed his mind about the entire concept of alien abduction, Mr. Krycek. He now says it is all a military conspiracy to test out biological weapons on the unsuspecting masses."

They shared a look, silently admitting just how close to the truth Mulder was, even if he was only looking at part of it. Krycek cleared his throat. "I can turn him. I know what buttons to push. What arguments to use. I can make him listen."

There was another long pause as the old man thought it through. This time, Krycek gave him the time he needed, confident in the final decision. For they did need Mulder, and he was the best liaison the Consortium would come up with to make sure they got him. After what felt like an eternity, the old man nodded.

"Very well, Mr. Krycek, we will try it your way. Turn him back to the path we need him to walk. Or run, very far and very fast, because you will not have another chance. And the third strike will be your last."

The door swung shut behind him, leaving Krycek in the dark. His skin began to crawl. He'd had an unreasoning fear of the dark ever since being locked in the depths of a silo with an alien in his body and a ship lurking in the darkness. His version of hell was utter blackness, surrounding him, wrenching itself from his eyes and his throat, leaving him a raw voiced mass of pain on a cement floor. He hated them, these damned aliens. Hated them with a passion, hated them more than anything he could even dream. Oh, he would turn Mulder back to the truth, all right. He didn't have a choice. They needed all the allies they could get.

Trying to stave off the panic clawing at his lungs, he stared into the inky blackness and pictured Fox Mulder's face. Soft, wide hazel eyes rimmed with dark, wispy lashes. Strong nose, slight cleft in the chin. That mouth, full, looked soft, he wondered what it would taste like. There was a little mole just at the right corner of his lips. Arousal gradually grew, pushing back the unreasoning fear, fighting back the darkness. As his thoughts became more explicit, he began to relax, and with the release of tension, he finally fell asleep.

 

Not far from the dark, a surgical auditorium, softly lit. A group of men, middle aged, some elderly, peering at a young woman, inert on an operating table. No sound in the room but hushed breathing. Two men, with different agendas, and the same thirst for power.

The larger one spoke first, his voice an unpleasant monotone. "We are not strong enough to stop them. Appeasement is our only course of action. Anything else will see us destroyed."

A dapper elderly man with cold eyes flicked a single glance at him, then returned his concentration to the woman below. "You have seen to that. You should not have turned over the alien resistor to them. By doing that, you may well have destroyed our last chance at gaining an alliance with the resistance." His voice was quiet but venomous. The big man stared at him for a moment, then turned and walked from the room. One by one, the others followed. Some avoided the elderly man's gaze. Some made direct eye contact.

Sides were chosen without a word being spoken.

In the silence after the last of them left, he stared down at his hope for salvation. The doctor lifted an eyelid.

The pupil was clear.

The alien infestation was dead.

Resistance was possible.

He smiled. It did not reach his eyes.

_(The lover speaks about the monsters)_

Mulder unlocked the door, listened instinctively for any sounds of intruders before he pushed open the door, then laughed silently at himself for his rampant paranoia. If the military really wanted to take him out, they could have, long before this. And why should they? He dumped his coat on the couch, and glanced around the darkened apartment. It wasn't like he was that much of a threat, after all. No one believed him. As usual.

A tiny flash of light against the dark carpet caught his eye. A message? Leaning over to read the block writing, he made out the words 'things are looking up' just as a heavy weight came down over his back. He tried to buck it off, but their combined weights and forward motion only ended when he went head first into a table leg. Through the ringing in his ears, he recognized a voice he had hoped never to hear again.

Krycek.

Fuck.

They exchanged their usual pleasantries. The double (triple?) agent told him he was pathetically easy to take. He suggested Krycek go play with himself. His own gun was cocked in his face, and he tried to joke it off. Then Krycek decided to change all the rules.

At first, he didn't take it seriously. Another alien conspiracy? Shit, he'd thought the guy was serious. At Krycek's harsh urging, he looked up into the liquid dark eyes staring at him so intently. Staring into his soul. The words made no sense, wrapped as he was in the depth of those eyes. They were so focused they seemed to burn at him. Fight or Die? Fight what? With what? Resist ... or serve? Serve whom? Resist how? What the hell was he talking about? Was Krycek going to kill him or just talk nonsense at him? He was so serious about the whole bizarre scenario.

There was a moment of tense silence, then Krycek lunged forward suddenly. Mulder flinched, instinctively drew his face to the side -- the wrong side. He felt the heat of Krycek's face close to his, the short soft slide of lips grazing the right corner of his mouth before they settle on his skin. He felt the tip of a wet, warm tongue flicker against the slight uprise of the mole beside his mouth. He was frozen, unable to move, unable to process exactly what was happening to him. It felt like it lasted for an hour. Then with a loud smack, Krycek pulled back. He stared up at him, feeling shell shocked. Those dark eyes flickered over him, a sharp once-over that missed nothing, as if memorizing him. Then, with a short nod, he murmured something in Russian. The only word Mulder recognized was Tovarisch, and that was from watching too many episodes of Man from U.N.C.L.E. as a child. His mind spun in a loop as he watched the door swing shut behind his nemesis' back. He'd always thought Solo and Illya had something going. Had Krycek been trying to tell him something? Beyond the nonsensical ravings about alien insurrection and last ditch resistance?

He felt the weight of the gun in his hand, reflexively aimed at where Krycek had been standing, His finger slipped off the trigger as the barrel slowly tilted toward the floor. He wouldn't have shot the bastard. Just as Krycek wouldn't shoot him. How he knew, he wasn't certain. But he knew. There was a connection there. Whether he wanted it or not, and God only knew he didn't want it, it was there. It wasn't accidental, but it wasn't under his control, either. It just was, and he supposed by now he should used to it.

His mind, dizzy from swooping around all the possibilities, tossed up a word from the torrent of threat Krycek had poured out at him. Weikamp? Other words starting pinging in his brain. Alien versus alien. Colonization. Resistance. Allies. Last chance to fight. Had to believe. War.

Tovarisch.

He pulled himself up onto the couch and collapsed against the cushions, staring sightlessly into the mid-distance. So many things to think about. So many truths to sift through. So many monsters to fight.

Tovarisch.

His right hand crept up to touch the side of his face, fingertips lingering over the cooling skin. He could still feel the touch of Krycek's lips at the corner of his mouth.

Allies.

No fucking way in hell.

Not on this earth.

He took a deep breath.

Hell. On earth.

His eidetic memory replayed scenes of horror to him, charred remains that had once been human, curled into fetal balls in a futile attempt to escape their fate. In Russia. At Sky Mountain. On a dam in Virginia. Hell on earth.

Perhaps this alliance might not be such a bad idea after all. It wasn't as if he had a lot of choice, anyway. It -- they -- just kept finding him and pulling him back. And if escape was hopeless, then he was damned if he was going to sit passively by and be used. By anyone.

 

The mass assassinations in Kazakhstan were the beginning of the cracks in the wall of silence surrounding the work of the aliens. As pressures grew within the covert world, fissures formed, and more facts were made known to the public, which misinterpreted them with a will. All except a very few.

Special Agent Dana Scully was a scientist, first and foremost. She was a doctor, a law enforcement official, a daughter, a sister, a partner. And, if her own memories were to be believed, an alien abductee. Her hand rose to rub at the back of her neck. A tiny microchip embedded there, that may or may not have saved her life. Made her barren. Given her cancer.

Cured it.

And a week earlier, had apparently taken over her conscious mind. Led her to a dam in the middle of rural Virginia, to the middle of a battlefield between two alien species trying to kill one another along with any foolish human being who made the mistake of being caught up in the middle.

She wasn't too sure she believed a word of it.

She rambled, head down, staring at the dried leaves her feet kicked as she walked the streets of her neighborhood. Her hands were buried in her pockets, fists clenched partly from cold, partly from the emotions that were tightening every muscle in her body. The images had been so real. True, it had taken hypnosis to break through the block that was keeping them from her conscious mind, but with Dr. Werber's help she'd managed to recover most of the memories.

She stopped, struck by the thought of her own disbelieving reaction when Mulder had told her of his own recovered memories. No wonder he had the strength of his convictions -- they felt so real. "Oh, my God." The whisper slipped from her mouth, barely stirring the cold air in front of her face. If he could stand in the face of memories, or interpretations of events, or whatever they actually were, and defy them ... if he could stand on the facts he felt he could prove ... perhaps he was right, after all. It had been a powerful event. And perhaps she had been listening to his stories, to his convictions, for so long they had seeped into her own subconscious, causing her to interpret the happenings of that late night as another alien abduction, when in fact it might, just might have been the results of the clean up of a military experiment gone horribly wrong.

Straightening her shoulders, taking a deep, cleansing breath of the early morning air, she turned toward her car and headed toward Mulder's apartment. They had a lot to talk about.

When she tried to articulate her reservations to him, he threw her another curve ball.

 

"NOOOOOOOOOO!"

A scream, lingering, agonized. Strangled.

The light flashed around him, bathing Mulder in cool terror, as memories of his sister's abduction, his own experience at a remote listening post with only a dead man to witness, melded with the present to tip him from rationality. He didn't know what he was protesting, another, taken from him before he could get his answers, the assassin, stopped before he could plunge the stiletto home, the cowering prisoner, the faceless being hulking in the opening of the tarp at the back of the truck. He didn't know why he was screaming his defiance, but he had no choice. His gun was up, aiming at whom he had no idea, his eyes were squinting against the blinding light.

He and Scully had come to Weikamp Air Force Base to see if there was any truth to Krycek's wild tale of alien resistance fighters and inter-alien warfare. Here it was, shining in his eyes, making them water. Making his brain hurt.

The truth was in his face, and he was screaming no. There was a joke buried in there somewhere, and he was afraid it was on him.

Wind whipped up around them, shaking the truck, battering the heavy tarp covering the flat bed. There was a rattle of steel, an impression of movement, a flicker of ... something ... just past him. Then the world went white.

He came back to reality to find himself being roughly escorted out of the truck and shoved in to the back seat of a nondescript military vehicle. His eyes hurt like hell, and his head felt like there were jackhammers going through it. Scully was beside him. He heard her ask, through the haze of pain, what he had seen.

"Nothing." Nothing that he could distinctly recall. But that was the trick with a mind like his. His grasp of the concept of recall was just that slight bit off what everyone else might consider exact. He remembered enough.

Scully had known the face of the truck driver. He had looked, and he didn't know the balding, mustachioed man with the disgruntled look on his face. But he had certainly recognized the man who had climbed into the back of the truck. Recognized the face, recognized the pick in his hand.

A strong memory of Scully melting into another form pushed to the front of his mind. That same, identical assassin, or his brother, or his clone, killing Jeremiah Smith and the young girl who looked like Samantha. Coming after him, nearly killing Scully ... a shape shifter. And not one like their old friend Eddie. One who bled green, whose blood poisoned the air so that humans could not breathe without dying. One who killed others, like himself, who were considered a risk.

Shit. Krycek was right.

The aliens were here, after all. Something he knew, had just forgotten, had forced himself to ignore. And they were fighting each other.

He dropped his hand from where it was shielding his eyes and stared into the concerned face of his partner. "I'm okay, Scully." Well, yeah, it was bullshit. But what was he supposed to say? Forget everything I just told you I really, truly, deeply believe and go back to the old story? Stop, rewind, do-over? He smiled slightly in spite of himself. "Just have some things to think about."

Her hand curled over his, tugging at his fingers. He remembered offering the same comfort to her when she was caught up in the nightmare of her recollections of the dam, and his fingers tightened appreciatively around her small palm. They didn't speak the rest of the way back to the base.

Transferred efficiently to their own government car, they left with a stern warning. He knew nothing more would come of it -- the men behind the snatch, or the exchange, or whatever the hell it had been, couldn't afford the attention such a reprimand might bring. It was a silent ride home, both occupants of the car having plenty to keep them preoccupied. He let her off at her door, watched as she let herself into her apartment, and slowly put the car in gear. Heading through the late night quiet streets to his own apartment, he let his mind wander. There was so much here, so many things to sort through, and for once his famed eloquence had deserted him. How could he explain it to her, when he couldn't even explain it to himself?

_The language is leaving me in silence_

Three beers and two hours later, Mulder was little closer to an answer. He had all the elements, but couldn't get them all to fit together. The lock turning in his front door didn't startle him the way he thought it probably should have. Subconsciously he must have been waiting for it. For him.

"C'mon in, Krycek. Have a beer."

"Don't mind if I do."

The damnedable humor was back in the raspy voice. Mulder didn't look over at him as the other man lowered himself down beside him on the couch. When a strong hand took his own beer from his hand and chugged the remainder, he just let his head fall against the back of the couch and closed his eyes. Maybe it would make more sense in the dark. With Krycek, it usually did.

"We have shape shifting aliens. We have oil aliens."

"Tell me about it," Krycek interjected dryly. Mulder ignored him and continued his inventory.

"We have bees carrying plague. We have clones. We have rogue aliens who are running around with melted faces."

"The gang's all here," Krycek chirped.

Mulder barely restrained himself from belting the mouthy bastard. He cracked open one eyelid and glared sourly at Krycek's profile. How the hell could a murdering, lying, traitorous scum look so fucking cute? Life wasn't fair. It must be the nose. He'd always had a yen for cute little upturned noses. He shook himself slightly and reached to take his bottle back. It was empty. Sighing, he decided it wasn't worth the effort to get another and closed his eyes again.

"We have one band of aliens fighting another band." Why? It made no sense.

"We have the colonizers and the resistance," Krycek put in, all laughter gone from his voice. "At least among the aliens. Among the humans, we have the collaborators, and the dupes, and the ignorant. We're working on the resistance."

He settled more comfortably on the couch, his shoulder brushing against Mulder's. He felt warm to Mulder, warm and oddly unthreatening. A little like it had been at the beginning of their partnership, before Krycek had betrayed him. Pushing the thought down as an unnecessary distraction, he concentrated on the puzzle. He was supposed to be the master-fucking-profiler, so where was the pattern? His mind flashed on Krycek, coming out of the bathroom at the airport in Hong Kong. A diver, covered in oil on the floor of his flat in France. Himself, feeling the slide of slick ooze in his mouth, his eyes, then nothing until the tiny prick of a needle, and the cold stone floor of his cell in Tunguska. A bright light. Two aliens, no, three. One with a recognizable face. Another, mutilated, scars covering their eye sockets, nostrils, mouths. A third, fluid, formless.

Resist.

Scarred. No entrance. Resisting.

Serve.

Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Service. Not partnership. Colonized.

Slaves.

"Holy shit," he breathed, sitting up abruptly and dislodging Krycek, who merely turned toward him and regarded him with a mildly inquisitive look. Mulder stared at him, eyes wide with shock. It fit. Holy fucking christ, but it fit. He took a deep breath.

Krycek smiled at him. "You got it. What did you get?"

Mulder opened his mouth and the words began to spill. "The shape shifters. They're both resistance and conquerors. Because they're mules for the oil aliens. The ones who resist, the ones who want to stop the colonization, the ones who want to help us fight back. They're shape shifters who've managed to escape being inhabited by oil aliens, or they're immune somehow, or something. Anyway," a slicing hand gesture made it clear that was not important, and would be explained later when more information was available. "The clones are just drones, test subjects. Do the manual labor, be used for the hybridization experiments. The shape shifters, they're a subjugated alien race. It's the oil aliens, the old aliens, that are running the show. They're the ones with the ships, they're the ones that use anyone and anything that gets in their way to serve their purpose."

"What about the bees?" Krycek asked, his calm tone belied by the intent look in his eyes.

"Fuck if I know," Mulder admitted. "Maybe they're a test of some sort, some kind of method of mass contamination. An airborne plague carrier to cull the herd, take out the weak ones so only the healthiest are left for hosts. Then we have the Consortium-"

"Collaborators," Krycek nodded. "With a mole or two of their own."

Mulder looked at him sharply. Krycek nodded again. "And the military?"

"Collaborators or dupes. Appeal to the power aspect, or the patriotism angle, or hook 'em by one means or another. They're tools, unwitting or not." This time it was Mulder's turn to nod.

"So, the oil aliens in league with the military are creating these chips, using them to control people-"

"Breeders, mainly," Krycek postulated. Mulder winced at the term, but had to admit it was apt.

"They use their shape shifting hosts as their advance force and to do the clean up. Wet work." He glanced at Krycek, reading agreement in his face. He pursed his lips, thinking deeply. "But some of the shifters don't agree. Want to escape, stop being slaves. They find a way to kill the oil aliens, without killing themselves. Inoculate themselves somehow." He felt Krycek start beside him, but was too busy formulating theories to stop and ask what had caused the reaction. "Then go about disrupting the colonization schedule. Kill the willing participants. Force their hand." He ran one hand through his hair, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. "Now what the fuck are we supposed to do about all this?"

"Fight them." It sounded like a command. Mulder shifted on the couch until he was facing Krycek, their knees nearly touching. "Some of the collaborators are making a pact with the resistance. Not all the members of the consortium want to go along with the colonization. So, we band together and we fight them."

"And how do you propose we do that?" No sarcasm, it was too serious, too all encompassing, for that.

"Any way we can," Krycek responded. "With any weapon we can find."

Mulder stared at him. In the small pool of light shed by the single lamp beside the couch, Krycek looked like a demon, or a ghost. Or a hell's angel, all in black leather, all stubble and tired eyes and menace. His eyes traveled along the line of his brow, down his cheek to his chin, then down his throat to his collarbone. Skipping along the line defined there, unaware he was doing it, his gaze wandered down the worn leather sleeve until it got to the hand resting beside Krycek's thigh on the seat cushion.

There was something wrong with it.

He stared at it for a long moment before it dawned on him. It wasn't real. Wasn't made of flesh and blood. It was held at an odd angle, fingers curved stiffly, wrist unnaturally straight. His eyes wandered back up, and this time he saw the slight bulging of material under the sleeve. The implications hit him like a kick to the stomach, and he took a gulp of air.

"What ... when ..." He couldn't bring himself to ask the question. Krycek looked at him with cynical disbelief.

"What do you think? Or were you just shooting in the dark with that comment about me doing myself with the same hand I took you with? Only one I've got now, Mulder." He leaned forward and set the empty beer bottle on the floor beside the couch, then straightened and glared at Mulder. "When? When I was fucking stupid enough to follow you under that damned barbed wire at Tunguska. The peasants have their own ways of avoiding the gulag draft, Mulder. They chop off the arm the docs use to test the vaccine."

Mulder was shaken from his preoccupation with the prosthetic arm to ask, "What vaccine?"

Krycek grinned at him. "They're still working on it." Mulder had the sneaking suspicion Krycek was lying, but that wasn't an unusual feeling where his ex-partner was concerned, so he ignored it and inclined his head toward the plastic arm. "Working on that, too," Krycek cracked, bitterness underlying his determinedly light tone. "You have no clue sometimes, you know that, Mulder?"

The whiplash of accusation stung him, but Mulder kept silent, waiting to hear where Krycek would go with this. There was a lot of pent up anger in the man. Perhaps it could be useful. He might let something slip if he got a chance to vent.

It seemed his silence was all the permission Krycek needed. With an explosive movement, he heaved himself off the couch and began to pace, tight, barely controlled turns across the tiny living room floor. As he paced, he growled, spitting the words from behind clenched teeth. "I've been fighting with fucking shadows for four years, Mulder. Playing one against the other, watching them, doing things ... killing people, interrogations, beatings. For them, and to keep myself alive. It was so clear at the beginning. I was doing this for my country. For myself. For the future. Bullshit!" He swung on one heel and towered over Mulder, still seated on the couch. "There's not going to be any goddamned future, Mulder! Not if we don't do something about it. And what the hell can we do? They can look like anyone. They can change form at will. They can take you over and use you and toss you aside, or turn into a little nuclear fireball and crisp anything that gets in their way. And what the hell have we got on our side?"

By this time, he was leaning over, his hand twisting in Mulder's collar, pulling their faces close together. Mulder could feel Krycek's breath on his face, practically count each individual eyelash. And it was turning him on. Just when he really didn't need the distraction, his cock decided to get in on the game. Typical shitty timing. Typical shitty taste. He tuned back into what Krycek was hissing in his face, trying to ignore his body's reaction to the other man's close proximity.

"An old man trying to stage a coup in the Consortium, a woman with no agenda but her own, an abductee who won't admit she was abducted, a guy who can't make up his mind which obsession to run with, and what's left of me!" The dark eyes were wild, and Krycek was breathing heavily. He looked to be at the end of his rope. "Against the whole fucking universe, with just a few terrified, blinded frankensteins to help us out!"

Mulder reached around the strong hand that was threatening to choke him. Trying to get the other man to calm down, he sought to break the iron hold on his collar by sliding his right hand up to bunch Krycek's tee shirt in his fist, slipping his left arm around Krycek's already bent knees, and tugging him just hard enough to pull the enraged man forward. Krycek stumbled, off balance and already leaning in over Mulder, and landed with a satisfying whuff of shock in Mulder's lap instead of on the couch where Mulder had intended him to land. They stared at one another in shocked silence for a long moment

"We've all made our sacrifices, Alex," he said softly. Wide, feral eyes stared up at him, unblinking, from an inch away. "And we're going to make more. Because we haven't got any choice." He pulled his hands away from the warm flesh as if it scalded him. "We will do what we have to do. War makes strange allies." He turned away and started to rise, intent on putting some space between the two of them. A strong hand clamped down on his thigh, holding him in place. Trying to ignore the panic making his heart beat in his throat, he glared over his shoulder at Krycek.

The ferocity was muted, banked but still there, glinting at him. Before he had a chance to protest, he found himself flipped over onto his back. Krycek fell heavily on him, pinning him to the couch, his hands caught, his right caught between his hip and the back of the couch, the left one pushing uselessly against the solid bulk of Krycek's chest. The dark head tilted, and a hot mouth fastened itself over the artery running up the side of his neck, directly over the pulse point. He opened his mouth to protest. The only thing he could get out past the constriction tightening his throat was a half-choked whimper. Krycek seemed to take that as encouragement, because the biting kiss gentled into a strong suckling. Mulder's earlier erection returned full force. Krycek must have felt it prodding into his thigh, because he began to writhe gently against Mulder.

He felt like he'd fallen down the rabbit hole.

One minute they're calmly discussing the possible colonization of the earth by hostile aliens, and lending their aid to the resistance efforts of another already enslaved group of aliens. Then Krycek flips his lid, he tries to escape, and next thing he knew they were making out on the couch, dry humping each other. Mulder concentrated on his groin for a second, not a difficult thing to do when it was the center of his universe. Amazing how fast the brain drained along with the blood in times like this. Yeah. He was humping back.

"Krycek." God, he sounded like he'd just run a marathon.

"hmmmm?" The vibration against his throat sped up the humping by a factor of ten, at least. He scrambled to find a working brain cell.

"This is nuts." Crazy. Insane. Stupid. Bizarre. Twilight zone un-fucking-believable. Krycek finally released his mouthful of Mulder's throat and pulled back far enough to meet his eyes. For the moment, neither of them acknowledged the way their groins were dancing against one another.

"We are nuts," Krycek answered him seriously. "We're going against unbeatable odds, in an unwinnable war, and we have no choice but to win it. I think this scenario calls for at least a little simple human connection before the shit hits the fan, don't you?"

Mulder tried to find the flaw in that reasoning, certain there had to be one. Snatching at straws, he tried, "I hate you."

Krycek nipped at his lower lip, then gave it a bath with the tip of his tongue. Mulder moaned. "I hate you, too," Krycek said soothingly. Mulder made another effort to focus on him.

"Then why are we doing this?" That made sense! Yes. Something was still working. Not well, but a stray synapse or two was still firing. As Krycek bore down with his hips, rocking with steady purpose against his aching erection, he heard the other man's answer through the growing rush of blood pounding in his skull.

"Because we may hate each other," A strong buck, nearly taking him over the edge that time. "But we need each other, too." Warm, soft lips trailed along his cheek, a tongue edged around the rim of his ear, sharp teeth caught his ear lobe, then released it. "And we need each other more than we hate each other."

The sucking was back, all along his throat, marking him. Making him completely insane. One last, sharp bite to the tender spot beneath his ear and he came, thrusting hard against Krycek's groin, feeling the contractions rock him. When the shaking finally stopped, he realized that Krycek must have climaxed as well, because he was draped bonelessly over Mulder's front, nuzzling into the side of his neck. Great. He had a crick in his neck from the odd angle he was pushed against the arm of the couch. One hand had fallen asleep and the other soon would, from the weight of the man lying on his chest. His back was already starting to hurt, and his stomach and groin were a wet, sticky mess. He hadn't come in his pants since he was a teenager.

He had no idea why he was grinning like an idiot.

Sometime later they pulled apart. Mulder lay, watching Krycek, idly scratching at the dried semen sticking his jeans to his skin. Krycek sat on the corner of the coffee table, staring at him in the darkness.

"Wanna shower?" It was the first thing he's said since they'd started their crazy version of a lap dance. Krycek grinned faintly at him.

"Yeah. Sounds good." Krycek looked down at his lap, unaccountably shy before shaking it off. "Thanks."

Mulder swallowed, watching Krycek watching his throat. The man had a neck fetish, apparently. He felt himself getting hard again. It was uncomfortable, trapped in the stained jeans. He reached down to adjust himself, and Krycek's eyes followed his hand. "Yeah." It came out huskier than he'd meant it to sound. He licked his lips. "Need more than hate, huh?" Mulder knew his own vulnerabilities, his own personal weaknesses. Vampires, aliens ... Phoebe ... if it was going to hurt him, he wanted it. Looked like there was a new addiction to add to the list.

Krycek pushed himself back and headed for the shower, tossing a glance over his shoulder. Mulder followed as if towed by a chain behind him. Somewhere along the line his mind had switched off, and he was running on pure instinct. It didn't tell him to trust Krycek. No matter how far gone he was, he wasn't that stupid. But it agreed, loudly and at length, with Krycek's assertion that they needed each other. There had to be some reason why fate kept flinging them at one another.

Couldn't just be so they could beat one another up. Or off.

So he was willing to try the allies idea. Willing? Eager.

His wandering thoughts came to an unexpected halt when he ran nose first into the closed bathroom door. He stared at it, confused, for a moment. As his fist reached up automatically to knock, he stopped and considered. This was ridiculous. This was his bathroom. His shower. His apartment. His … what the hell was Krycek? Lover? Uhm, no. Sort of. Maybe. He shook his head, hard. Whatever he was, he was in the Mulder's shower without Mulder. His hand lowered and he turned the knob. Krycek was just stepping under the steaming water.

Great legs.

Mulder leaned against the closed bathroom door, taking in the view. Really great legs. Nice ass. Nice, and firm, and round. He licked his lips and forced his eyes up further. Took three tries, but he made it to the small of Krycek's back. He found himself wanting to curl up in that inviting little hollow, lick the dimples at the base of his spine, make camp and stay there for a few months. No aliens, no icepicks, no malevolent oil creatures trying to take over his body. Just Alex Krycek, clean sheets, maybe some warm caramel sauce, and that lovely back.

Which then whirled around and presented an equally lovely front, if in a very different fashion. Unfortunately, the move took Krycek off balance and he skidded on the damp floor. Mulder instinctively reached out to grab his arm to steady him. Caught him. Held him steady. Sort of.

The stump felt strange, lumpy, seamed, under his hand. Krycek stood completely still in his grip. A fine shiver ran up and down his frame, but Mulder couldn't tell if it was from cold or something else entirely. He couldn't see how it could be the cold, in the small, steam-filled room. The scars covering the otherwise soft skin were rough to his touch. He examined it carefully, eyes intent, his touch light on the ruined limb. As it began to quiver under his touch, he ran his palm gently up to Krycek's shoulder, holding him in place. Finally, he raised his eyes to the other man's face.

"I'm sorry." It was a whisper. It also was not what Krycek had been expecting to hear, judging by the stunned look on his face.

"It's not your fault," he managed to squeeze out. Mulder shook his head.

"Still. I'm sorry." Mulder leaned forward, softly feathering kisses along the scars. They each had paid, in their way. His own scars were less visible, but he could appreciate this sort of pain as well. Krycek was beginning to shake hard now, and he stepped closer, wrapping his left arm around the other man's waist, holding him still. He continued to kiss along the outside of the wasted muscle, easing the pressure marks from the prosthesis, then following the line of arm until he reached the smooth skin of the shoulder. Pausing where the curve of shoulder met neck, he bit down, once, leaving a light semi-circle to mark his passage.

Lifting his head, he looked into Krycek's face. The man looked dazed. Looking down, he noticed that other parts of Krycek's anatomy were responding quite nicely. It was Mulder's turn to shiver. It had been a long time since he'd been with another guy, and there was no comparison between college buddies experimenting (even if his college buddies had learned the ropes at the finest public schools in England) and the bundle of dangerous contradictions that was Alex Krycek.

Stepping back a pace, he steered Krycek into the shower. "Better use this before it goes stone cold," he suggested, then handed the younger man the bath sponge. Reaching past Krycek's head into the caddy for the soap, ignoring the intent look he was getting, he poured some onto the sponge. "Wash."

Krycek looked down at the sponge, back up at Mulder, and proceeded to wash Mulder. Thoroughly. While that wasn't exactly what he'd meant, he relaxed into the unexpected full body massage. He did his best not to melt into the tiles as Krycek turned him and began to run the sponge over his back in wide, soothing strokes. Then Krycek leaned close, running the soapy sponge along his flanks. He felt a whisper of breath on the side of his neck and tilted his head to give better access. Instead of the kiss he was expecting, Krycek spoke into his ear.

"Doesn't it bother you?" The sponge never stopped moving. It swirled around the slight indentation of his waist and headed directly for his groin.

"No," Mulder managed to answer, closing his eyes against the nubby caress as it swept under his sac, lifting it and teasing behind it. He spread his legs unconsciously to give Krycek better access. "No," he tried again, not paying much attention to what he was saying. "Bothers me that you had to go through that. But I've seen worse thin--god, Alex." He lost his train of thought and his breath at the same time as Krycek wrapped the sponge around his cock and began to squeeze it back and forth around him. It took very few strokes before he was on the verge of orgasm.

"Good," Krycek mumbled into his shoulder blade. Mulder had no idea what he was talking about and didn't give a damn. He had to come, soon, or his skin was going to explode. Then the sponge dropped away, along with the pressure, and the cooling water slicked down over the top of his erection. Before he could howl protest, he was shoved sideways, pivoting around to follow the strong arm guiding him. Back to the spray, he looked down in delighted disbelief as Krycek slid down the front of his body, coming to rest on his knees between Mulder's feet. Without so much as a pause for breath, the other man swallowed him to the root.

Mulder gasped. Tried to say something, some warning. Tried to stop the hurricane taking him off his feet. Tried to make it last. He failed it all, including his aborted effort to draw a decent breath. All the energy in his body concentrated into a small knot in his stomach, then his balls drew up and he convulsed, coming hard, flying apart. His back arched as he thrust heavily into Krycek's mouth, his hands clenching in the short hair at the sides of Krycek's head. Three, four bursts, and his knees gave out. A long arm wrapped around his waist, guided him into the tub, settled him against a broad, lightly furred chest. He vaguely heard the rasp of the taps being turned off, cutting off the rapidly cooling water before it could turn cold.

Before he could quite gather his wits from the four corners of the world where they'd scattered, he was gently turned and draped over the edge of the tub, facing the room. It was a fascinating view on the pipe under the sink, he'd never seen it from this angle. Nearly asleep in spite of the uncomfortable position, he felt a hot thrust along the cleft of his ass. Responding automatically to the urgency of the movement, he pushed back. Krycek looped his arm around Mulder's chest, covering him from behind, and thrust steadily, sliding along the damp flesh. The friction spreading his cheeks and teasing his anus was utterly new to Mulder, and if he hadn't already come twice in just over an hour he'd've found it very arousing. As it was, he relaxed into the sensation, experimentally tensing his buttocks with each upstroke. There was a garbled moan from behind him, signifying approval, and he did it again. A few more thrusts and Krycek climaxed, shuddering against his back.

Mulder felt a fraction more energetic than Krycek. Leaning forward, wincing at the now cold tile on his unprotected genitals, he snagged a loose towel and flipped the edge over his shoulder. Krycek took the hint and cleaned up his mess, slowly rubbing the towel in small circles over Mulder's back long after he was clean and dry. Too wiped out to respond, he looked over his shoulder, surprised by the softness in the usually well guarded face.

"You're beating a dead horse, Alex. No life left in this one," he admitted. Krycek leaned forward and kissed him, softly, over the mole beside his mouth. A very different touch than the first time he had kissed him there. He still wasn't ready to think about it. He shifted until Krycek obliged him and moved off, then stepped out of the tub. There was a double line of red running across his ribs where Krycek had pushed him into the door runners for the shower doors while leaning over him. He ran a finger around the pressure marks. He hadn't even felt it at the time.

Too tired to think about anything, not wanting to go places he wasn't ready to face, he walked into the bedroom. Pulling back the covers, he crawled in and rolled over, staring into the bathroom.

"You gonna stay in there the rest of the night?" It was as close as he could come to issuing an invitation. Krycek snapped off the light and walked into the room. Pausing at the side of the bed, he opened his mouth to say something. Probably something Mulder didn't want to hear. "Give it a rest, Alex. There's plenty of time tomorrow."

Krycek shut his mouth, settled himself under the covers next to Mulder, and fell immediately to sleep. Nudging the pillow higher under his head, Mulder stared at his bed partner. He had no idea where this was going to lead, if it was going to go anywhere. He might have just made a huge mistake. Or he might have done the only thing he could do that would clear the air enough to allow him to work with this man in the upcoming battle. Before he could come to any conclusions, the events of the day caught up with him, and he finally fell asleep.

That night there were no nightmares.

_Changes are shifting outside the words_

Bright heat spearing into his closed eyelids brought him awake the next morning. It was a good thing it was a sunny day. In all the madness of the previous night he had completely forgotten to set his alarm. He rolled over, stiffly, feeling the exertions of a rare night of sex pulling at his sore muscles, and squinted at the clock. Nearly ten. Shit. A movement caught his attention, and his eyes widened as he stared at the small figure standing in his bedroom doorway.

"Morning, Scully." What was his apartment, anyway, Grand Central? He shook the thought away and sat up, carefully pulling the sheet up to cover the majority of the love bites scattered all along his torso.

"Morning, Mulder. There's coffee in the living room." She turned to head back out into the front room.

"Been here long?" He couldn't resist. What exactly had she seen?

"No," she replied, not turning to look at him. "Get a robe on, Mulder. We have to talk."

Boy, did they ever. He took the ten minutes needed to scald the layers of dried semen off his skin, ran a towel over himself, pulled on some sweats and joined her on the couch. He very carefully did not think of what had happened on that spot nine hours earlier.

Scully stared into her coffee mug, then took a slow sip. Staring at her partner over the rim of the mug, she waited patiently. He gathered his thoughts, wrapped his hands around his own mug, and started to explain.

"There's more than one type of alien, Scully. The oil aliens, the ones they called Black Cancer, they use the second type, the shape shifters, as hosts." He paused, and she inclined her head. She had seen the shape shifters. One, wearing Mulder's form, had nearly killed her. Another, whom they thought they had killed, had managed to survive and then almost killed her. It was an unhealthy trend. "Now these oil aliens are beginning to colonize earth." He explained about the military collaboration, the microchips, the clones, the hybridization. She didn't say a word, listening calmly. When he began to talk about the resistance, she straightened and leaned forward. "They block the openings in their faces because that's how the oil aliens transport themselves." A shudder went through her. He scooted a little closer, trying to be reassuring. "If we're going to stop them, and we have to stop them, Scully, then we're going to have to work with some … unexpected allies." He stopped, bit his lip, wondered how to present this to her.

"How unexpected?" At least she wasn't walking out the door. Yet.

"At least one of the men in the Consortium. I met him a year or so ago. You met him, as well. At my funeral."

She thought for a moment, then nodded. "An elderly man, very well dressed, quiet voice, cold eyes."

"That's him. And a woman, she's with the UN. She has been an information source, gotten me documents, leads. I don't yet know the extent of her involvement, but she is in on this."

"What changed your mind, Mulder?" It was a legitimate question. Unfortunately, it led directly to the one ally he knew she was going to have the most trouble accepting.

"There was a pattern emerging, from all these incidents, from the mass immolations, the extraterrestrial biological entities we've encountered, the events at Tunguska." He looked at her, sincerity shining out of him. "I got some new information. From Alex Krycek."

That made her sit up. She set the coffee mug on the table with precise care. "And you trust him?"

"No," he smiled, a twitch of his lips. "I don't trust him at all. But he did have the information that made the pattern fit together, finally made it make sense."

She was staring at him as if he'd just grown a second head. "So, you're telling me that you won't believe your own recovered memories, you don't believe the description of what I went through on that bridge, you can't continue to accept the convictions that have guided you since you were a child, but you believe the man who murdered my sister, your father, tried his best to kill you and helped whoever the hell took me to abduct me?" She kept control over her voice, but the effort cost her dearly, and it was wobbling a little by the time she finished. She looked like she couldn't believe her ears. She certainly couldn't follow his reasoning.

He took a deep breath. He'd known it was going to be a hard sell. "Look at it from his perspective." Glossing over her muttered, "how do you expect me to think like a psychotic killer? That's your specialty" he forged on. "I don't pretend to know his reasons. But he's been right too many times not to listen to him. This time it all fits. He's scared. And he should be. The peasants in Tunguska cut off his arm." She drew in a sudden breath at that. He continued, determined to make her understand. "He knows what they're planning, Scully. He knows what they want, what they'll do. What he said is backed up with what you and I have both experienced, and it makes sense. Frightening sense, but sense that we have to pay attention to, because if we don't, it will be too late." He nodded toward her, eyes going to her neck. "They're calling for a reason. And if we don't fight back, there won't be anyone left to stop them."

Her hand rose to her nape, a fingertip rubbing gently over the small raised scar at the base of her neck. He watched her face, saw the grudging acceptance, recognized the willingness to go along despite her reservations. He relaxed, breathing easier now that she was on his side again. She shook her head. "Maybe we're both insane, Mulder," she finally said. "But if we're going to do it we can't do it alone. Watch your back."

He nodded agreement. "We'll watch each other's."

"First step? Other than committing ourselves to the nearest sanitarium?"

He ignored her mild sarcasm with the ease of long practice -- his bad habits had rubbed off on her a long time ago, and now he was reaping the benefit. "MUFON."

She bit the inside of her lip. She really did not want to ever see those women again. But if Mulder could work with Krycek … she nodded. "I'll make some calls."

"I'll contact the Lone Gunmen. See what they can come up with. There are also a few members of Congress who will still talk to me." As she rose and headed for the door, he called, "Scully?" She half turned. "Thanks." One brow arched and she shot him a quizzical look. "For believing. In me. And in yourself."

She tilted her head and stared at him for a long moment. "We don't have any choice." He tipped his head in acknowledgement of that truth, and reached for his cell phone as the door closed behind her.

 

It was the next afternoon before Scully had the chance to see her boss in private. An e-mailed invitation, a short telephoned acceptance, and they met in a small café some way from FBI headquarters. It wasn't one either frequented on a regular basis, so the odds of it being bugged were low. Walter Skinner was already at the table when she walked over to join him. He gestured at the opposite chair and they both sat.

The menu was quickly taken care of, and the waitress dispatched. He looked at her steadily, waiting for her to find her own approach to the reason she'd asked him to meet her. It didn't take long.

She folded her hands in her lap and met his eyes with a steady regard of her own. "Sir, you were right when you said that extraterrestrial involvement was more readily believable than military covert biological operations in the recent mass suicides." He leaned forward, and she took a deep breath. "What I am going to tell you sounds insane. But it is the truth."

"In the last five years of dealing with the X Files I've become accustomed to dealing with the insane, Agent Scully," he told her. She nodded her agreement.

"But this is more insane, more urgent, and on a much larger scale than anything we have seen before." She sat back, waiting for the waitress to serve them. When the plates were down and the woman was safely out of earshot, she continued. "We have the evidence of our personal experiences as well as corroborating evidence from first hand sources of this conspiracy." She explained about the two types of aliens, the enslavement of one type of alien by the other, and the planned colonization of earth. Skipping over some of the wilder claims Mulder had made, no matter how legitimate they might be, she stuck to the bare bones of the story. Skinner was silent when she finished. Picking up her fork, she played with her salad. Maybe doing this over lunch hadn't been such a good idea after all. She'd completely lost her appetite.

"And you believe him?" he asked after taking time to sort it all out for himself.

"I believe us, sir," she answered without hesitation.

Skinner looked into her face, down at his plate, then back up to her face again. "I'll see what I can find out," he said simply, taking up his own fork and cutting into his pasta. "I still have contacts in the military, and among some of the higher echelon at the Bureau who've proven themselves to be open minded enough to be of some use."

She smiled a quick thanks. "Be careful." The light glinted off the lenses of his glasses, hiding his eyes from her for a moment before the angle changed and she could see them again. They were hard and watchful, a warrior's eyes.

"Always."

 

Krycek knew the back way into nearly every hotel in New York. The Pierre was no exception. Making his way silently up the fire stairs, he slipped into a small, elegant room redolent with damask and mahogany. Marita was already there, standing beside and a little behind the Dandy. The old man waved a hand toward a cluster of chairs in the center of the room.

Contenting himself with one killing glare at his former lover, instead of breaking her neck like he'd fantasized, he bowed slightly from the waist and extended his hand in a polite gesture for them to precede him. They did, Marita watching him warily. The crack of the old man's voice startled them both out of their silent exchange of hostilities.

"Enough! We haven't the time for these juvenile games." They stared at him, and he stared them both down. "Now, tell me what progress you have made."

Krycek cleared his throat and relaxed into the chair with well-acted ease. Marita perched on the edge of her own chair, careful to keep her hands in sight, not wanting to give him an excuse.

"Mulder's in. Scully as well, of course. Scully met Skinner privately outside the Bureau, and indications are he is in as well. That gives us the FBI, some information sources in the military we'd otherwise not have, the abductees who will talk with Scully, Mulder's underground connections, and the ear of some Congressmen who are hostile to the Consortium." Krycek didn't have to say that without him, they would have none of them. It was his insurance that his allies on this side of the equation didn't cut his throat and drop him in an alley somewhere. He knew it, and they knew it.

Marita reported on her own efforts within the United Nations. She would be in a precarious position, as would the Dandy, being a double agent within the Consortium. It had taken a lot of groveling, double talk, and heartfelt lying through her teeth, but she had regained her previous position with them. The Dandy had helped considerably, behind the scenes.

"There are others within the Group who also see the need to resist the colonization efforts. I am coordinating a shift in power within the structure of the group." The old man sat military-straight in the chair, shifting his glance from one to the other of his subordinates, commanding their entire attention. "When that position is solidified, I will take covert control over internal decision-making within the Group. To that end, I will require you to perform a service, Mr. Krycek."

Krycek adjusted his sprawl to a somewhat more attentive posture. "Who do you want me to kill?"

The Dandy handed him a picture. He stared at it for a long moment, memorizing the features. Then he rose from the chair, took a lighter from his back pocket, and burned it, watching the ashes fall into the wastebasket below. When it was completely destroyed, he wiped his fingers free of ash and smiled boyishly at the old man.

"My pleasure."

 

The big man sat down for his first of many cups of coffee. It was his one weakness, a special dark roast he had flown in from Seattle. No one else touched it, and no one else used the beans, which he ground himself. The individual packages were tightly sealed, and he checked them thoroughly before he opened them to grind them each morning.

He was a very careful man.

He checked the grinder, freshly washed by his servants. He inspected the fine porcelain cup for any speck of contamination. He was a fastidious man as well.

He didn't see the clear coating of dried liquid on the edges of the blades of the grinder. Wasn't aware of the fast acting poison that flaked off into the fresh grounds with every slice into the hard beans. Couldn't smell the faint hint of something alien under the rich aroma of the brew. Tasted nothing unusual in the first deep gulp. For he was also a gluttonous man.

A very few moments later, he was a dead man.

_I used to have demons in my room at night_

_Desire, despair, desire_

_So many monsters_

Mulder sat at a booth at Lombardi's, on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. There weren't a lot of visitors on a blowy late Spring day, so it was relatively quiet. The calm didn't last for long.

"Fancy meeting you here." Krycek slipped into the booth opposite him and helped himself to a slice of thin crust pizza. Stuffing the end into his mouth, he chewed enthusiastically and stared at Mulder over the top of the crust. Mulder stared back.

"What the hell are you so happy about?" Didn't make sense to him. But then, little in his relationship with Krycek made sense to him. Especially the way his body reacted to the man. Just like Pavlov's dog, salivating at the ringing of a bell, he started to drool when Krycek walked in the door. If it wasn't so disconcerting it would be funny.

Krycek swallowed the last of the slice and licked his lips. Mulder followed the tongue tip with his eyes helplessly. It was going to be one of those afternoons. "We're not dead. That's cause for celebration. We've made progress. You gonna finish that?" He pointed at the last piece of pizza on the plate. Mulder gave up and pushed it over to him. "Thanks! After lunch, let's talk."

Mulder nodded, watching Krycek's jaw move, watching his throat move as he swallowed. Watching. He had a beautiful mouth. Mulder started when Krycek snapped his fingers under his nose.

"You in there?"

Not yet, but soon. He swallowed the inappropriate giggle that threatened to escape and tossed a twenty on the table. "Come on, let’s get out of here."

They didn't talk much on the way to the motel, inconsequential remarks about the sunshine, the ocean, the few hardy beachcombers. The door closed behind them, Mulder turning to lock it, and feeling a warm weight along his back. He shuddered.

"Talk, Krycek," he tried to command. It sounded more like a plea. As expected, Krycek paid no attention to his orders.

A hand tugged at his suit jacket, and he gave a second's thought to resisting. Then his body took over while his mind was still considering options, and he moved to strip with no further delay.

"Yeah," Krycek breathed, eyes roaming over him. "Get it out of the way, Mulder. Let all the steam out, then you can think again."

This man knew him much too well. "Shut up and take off your clothes."

Krycek grinned at him. "Make me."

Mulder stared at him like he'd lost his mind. "Asshole." Then he proceeded to undress Krycek with as much dispatch as he'd shucked his own clothes. The only time he hesitated was when they were both naked, and he reached for the straps binding the prosthetic arm in place. "Does it hurt?" Krycek started to shy away from his fingers, but Mulder hooked his left arm around the younger man's hips and held him in place. "Let me."

"No." It was a shuddering sigh of protest, but Mulder preferred to believe it referred to the first question, not a denial of permission for the actions he was already taking.

He unbuckled it carefully, soothing the flesh beneath the cup. Krycek whimpered, deep in his throat. Mulder laid it aside with equal care, then gathered Krycek up in his arms and held him, rocking him slightly, taking the urgency down a notch. Gradually the body in his arms relaxed, and a strong arm inched up his back, hand tangling in the thick hair at the back of his head. His face was turned until their mouths could meet.

Oh. That was why he did this. Funny, how easy it was to forget when they were clothed, when the power struggle between them got in the way of the elemental truth of their need for one another. His mouth was open, searching, tasting and being invaded in turn. Krycek was a nibbler, and he felt like he was being eaten whole. It made him feel more alive than anything he could ever remember.

Words echoed through his head, beneath the beat of the pulse in his ears. 'We're not dead' Yeah. That was reason enough in itself, and this was validation of that reasoning, verification of the connection between them. The kiss expanded, ranging from mouth to jaw to eyelid to nose back past lips to chin to throat.

Somehow they made it to the bed before they fell over. They landed in a tangle, legs entwined, hands groping for purchase against slick skin, eyes still closed, mouths still searching. Mulder gave up any attempt at thought, every nerve feeling as if it was stretched on the outside of his skin, sparking wherever it touched Krycek, which was everywhere. He was blanketed in the man. One hand stroked up the length of Krycek's leg from knee to crotch, parting strong thighs to dive between them and cup the straining genitals digging into his stomach. The other hand slid behind Krycek, soothing over the small of his back, two fingers gently forcing his ass cheeks apart, running fingertips up and down, over and across the sensitive skin there.

Krycek's hand finally loosened its grip in his hair and began to roam over his shoulder and back, rubbing small circles, pressing in long sweeping strokes. They were both aching and leaking, rubbing against one another, bracing knees and hips to get as much friction as possible between them. He was close, so close … the hand swept from his back to slide down between them, suddenly, grasping his testicles and pulling them downward. The abrupt move sent a sharp pain lancing through his abdomen, stopping the incipient orgasm. He growled out an incoherent protest.

"Not like that," Krycek groaned into his chest, pulling away from Mulder's hands to slither down his body. Coming to rest atop Mulder's thighs, nudging them apart with his shoulder to settle between them, he looked up and grinned wickedly at him. "Like this."

He nearly came when Krycek put his mouth around his cock, maintaining eye contact the whole time. It was the lewdest thing he'd ever seen, and he'd made a study of lewd things. "Oh, fuck," he moaned, wishing for a videocamera with the tiny part of his mind that wasn't completely caught up in what was happening.

Krycek broke suction long enough to say, "Later," then put his head down and went to work with a will before Mulder could even protest the loss of contact.

Mulder felt every muscle in his body tense up like a stretched rubber band as Krycek proceeded to lick and nibble and suck every inch of him, from perineum to crown. He pried his eyes open when he felt the world shift, unaware until that moment that he'd squeezed them tightly shut. Krycek had shifted him so that he was on his back, one leg over the pile of pillows, the other over Krycek's good shoulder. The position left him completely open, and Krycek took full advantage of the fact.

The first circling stab of tongue at his anus nearly made the top of his head come off. Yet another first for the Rat, sang merrily through his head, then fingers were milking his cock, that mouth was working at his ass, his own hands were nearly ripping the linens off the bed, and he was coming so hard he could swear his backbone was being pulled out of the end of his cock. He thought he screamed. He couldn't hear anything, couldn't see anything through the red haze clouding his vision, couldn't feel anything but the incredible pressure at his groin.

Then there was a different sort of pressure nudging at him. The leg that had been over Krycek's shoulder was now bent back to his chest, held down by the simple expedient of Krycek laying on him. He opened dazed eyes to take in the sight of Krycek's face, close to his. The thought struck him that the other man was beautiful, straining like this, flushed and wet with sweat, and that he should kiss him. Then the nudging burst into pain, and he arched instinctively against it, a move that opened him up further and allowed Krycek to slip deeper into him.

"Fuck!" he yowled. "Yeah," Krycek panted out. He didn't know whether to kiss him or kill him. Before he could find enough of his mind to make up, one way or the other, Krycek began to rock.

Holy shit. The pain shifted, suddenly, and he moaned involuntarily. His thighs fell further apart, as far as he could get them, cradling Krycek against his pelvis and chest. He could feel the slap of balls against his ass as Krycek thrust all the way in, and an irregular flare of sensation at the height of some strokes. His cock twitched, partially filling at the novelty of being opened and filled, partly at the friction of Krycek's belly moving against him, partly at the incredible turn on of being totally vulnerable, fucked and enjoying it, under his enemy. Yes, he thought wryly, giving up any further attempt at analysis, he was one totally fucked up man. A particularly hard thrust forced another moan out of him, and he nearly laughed. Fucked up in more ways than one.

Krycek leaned back slightly, changing the angle and deepening the penetration. Those little flares got bigger, hitting him deep inside with each stroke now. His cock filled completely, hard and aching, and he was thrusting back against Krycek, an active participant now. Krycek wanted more. "Do yourself," he growled through clenched teeth. The force and speed of his thrusts were increasing. Mulder licked his lips, then brought his palm up to his mouth and licked that as well. Krycek watched avidly as he lowered his hand to his cock and began to pull it in counter rhythm to Krycek's strokes. The dual sensations of fucking his hand and being fucked quickly became too much for him, and he threw his head back, closing his eyes.

Krycek stopped. He whimpered, opened his eyes, pleading with him to move. Wide, hot eyes stared back at him from a feral mask of a face. "Keep your eyes open, Mulder." He didn't know if he could. But if he didn't, Krycek was more than capable of torturing him there at the edge of orgasm forever. He was just the type to do it, too, damn him. Mulder made a supreme effort, struggling to keep his eyes open and glued to Krycek's. With a grim nod of approval, the other man finally took the initiative and pumped, hard. Within moments, the edge was right there again.

He fought to maintain that eye contact as he went over, panting and keening as he convulsed. He'd never come with anything in his ass before, and the feeling of the spasming muscle around Krycek's cock was absolutely incredible. He wrung his cock dry, writhing, impaled, watching himself in the dilated blackness of Krycek's pupils, seeing the heat there reflected back at himself, knowing the exact moment when Krycek came. Not by the convulsive heave of Krycek's groin against his ass, or the hot streams of semen bathing his guts, but by the unadulterated rapture in his eyes. One moment of honest connection. His soul bared, given the gift of Krycek's in return.

Then the shutters fell. Heavily lashed lids swept down, covering the naked truth in those eyes, then slowly raised again. Reality was back, where it undoubtedly belonged.

Krycek pulled out carefully, his hand soothing the trembling muscles in Mulder's thighs. Mulder took over the job as Krycek withdrew, rolling gracefully off the side of the bed. He lay there, rubbing his complaining quads, staring up at Krycek. Krycek returned the look for a moment, then leaned down and kissed Mulder, softly, at the corner of his mouth. Straightening, he turned his back to Mulder and headed for the shower.

Mulder pushed the back of his head against the pillow. Lacing his hands behind his head, shifting to get comfortable, careful of the twinges in his backside, he allowed his mind to start thinking again. Fighting to hold back a wave of depression that threatened to drown him, he forced himself to look at the situation as objectively as he could. Yes, he was probably crazy. No, appearances aside, he wasn't in love with Krycek. Neither was Krycek in love with him. Love had nothing to do with it.

They needed each other.

And they would continue to need one another. Until this was over, and they had won. When they would probably kill one another. Or until it was over, and they had lost, in which case they wouldn't need to kill one another, because someone else would surely have done it for them. No one else understood. Not Scully, although she understood things about him that Krycek never would. Not Skinner, god forbid. He could just imagine trying to explain a sexual relationship with Alex Krycek, of all people, to Walter Skinner. Not Frohicke, or any of his other few friends. There was a twisted logic to their … union? Liaison. Whatever it was. No one else could ever understand it because no one else could ever live it.

He heard Krycek step under the shower, and rolled over with a slight groan. Coming to his feet, he went to join him under the water.

After all, he was living it. And even he didn't understand it.

_The monsters are crazy_

Lights split the inky darkness of the early morning sky, deep in the forested mountains of the Appalachians, this time with no human bystanders to be caught up between the warring factions. A triangular mass, huge, starred with spotlights, flung itself sideways at high speed toward another mass, equally as huge. Tongues of fire shot out from hidden mouths along the sides of the ship, to be met by flares from the other. Below it, among the trees, fighting with desperate determination, blind man shaped creatures fought others with dead eyes. There were few sounds, other than the hiss of escaping alien blood, the sizzle as it ate into soil, the muted roar of flame-throwers, the crackling burst of pine needles caught in the crossfire.

They didn't scream as they died, or if they did, no one heard.

Scorched trees, burnt paths along the soil, slowing drying patches of oil marked the battle. Corpses collapsed, burnt to ash, or caving in on themselves, empty shells that quickly disintegrated into the earth. A clash, a conflagration, no quantifiable resolution, no advantage gained or lost. A stalemate, a retreat. To meet and clash again, until the will of the invader was conquered or the will of the enslaved submitted.

The battle was joined.

_There are monsters outside_

_Any Weapon_

When had Out There become Here?

Too quickly.

Seven years too late.

Thirty years in the waiting.

He was unique. It was his salvation. It was also the mark that shone from him, drawing his enemies as quickly as his allies.

Stepping into the circle of light, he smiled faintly as his brothers and sisters smiled at him. Walter Skinner's voice faded into the background. He turned, and stilled, looking up at the circle of lights above him, washing them all in purest white. Motion rippled through the people beside him. A space opened, and a man stepped into it.

He knew that face.

Knew those eyes.

They were calm. Staring back at him. Serene blue watching him from a face that could have been hewn from granite but in actuality had the facility of ceramic slip, free to reconfigure itself into any form required.

Mulder didn't smile, but inside, something began to hum. The residual effect of the black oil alien, perhaps, or his own unique hybrid blood. Something recognized the being in front of him in a way nothing else could.

Part of that something wanted to kill the bounty hunter. Called to him, implored him, shrieked at him. Another part wanted to join the bounty hunter. Go home, rest, surrender. It whispered to him, cajoled, crooned at him.

He fought them both down. Kept his face expressionless, an even better mask than the alien could manage. He nodded, a bare acknowledgement, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath, preparing himself as best he was able to begin the next phase of the operation. As the group ascended to the ship, the single thought speared him before he could stifle it.

He was in.

**Nine days earlier, Forj Siti Toui, Tunisia**

A filthy hand insinuated itself against his ass, and he twisted, catching the thumb in his right hand and dislocating it. The owner screamed and pulled away, completing the move Krycek had begun. Behind him he heard a babble of Turkish, Greek and Egyptian. Someone was explaining to the new guy.

Don't mess with the Russian.

Yeah, he only had one arm, and he wasn't real tall, or bulky, but anyone who'd been around for more than a few days knew the basics. He slept lightly, when he slept at all. Didn't seem to need much. Was possessed of a demon that shone from his eyes, and bad things happened to men who tried to take him. The newcomer was lucky he had gotten away with a mere broken hand.

He could have become a pile of bones.

Krycek glanced over his shoulder. Lisando, a smuggler from Malaga, was speaking rapidly into the new man's ear. The man's face was white with shock and pain, but his eyes weren't promising retribution.

They were seeing Hell.

Krycek turned back to the knot of men gathering at the bars. The Commandant of the prison fort was bringing in a visitor, and from the sound of the jeers, it was a woman. A foreign woman. He ducked into the crowd, angling to see without being seen.

He nearly broke cover when he saw the bright blonde hair of the visitor. The last time he'd seen Marita Covarrubias, she'd looked like a ghoul, a walking corpse. He'd left her there to die.

At least he hadn't actually finished her off.

She was looking much better. Fine enough for the inmates to be howling like dogs in heat. He remembered fucking her.

Dogs in heat was an apt description. Perhaps wolves would be closer, but wolves were much too ... noble for the likes of the two of them.

Hyenas, perhaps.

He smiled, internally, at the joke, then pushed his way forward as she called out, in English, that his release had been arranged. He stared at her.

"Last time I saw you," he rasped, "I left you for dead."

She almost smiled at him. He could see it in the minute tightening of the muscles around her eyes. They were blue again, not the black, sunken pits they'd been. She'd been so close to death. But then, she'd always been a survivor. Another thing they had in common.

"If it was strictly up to me," she answered readily enough, "I'd leave you here to rot, too."

He didn't doubt it.

The guard beat the other inmates back as he ducked out of the narrow opening of the door. He nearly got the edge of his shirt caught as it clanged shut. They didn't speak as they walked down the short hall to the shower. He stripped, completely unselfconscious in his nudity, and made careful note of her expression. She was dispassionate as always, but her eyes lingered on the scars at the base of his stump. She'd had a fascination with it whenever they'd had sex, intrigued by the sensitivity of the shiny tissues. He stepped under the spray and gasped as the cold water poured over his head. It felt obscenely good to wash away at least the top layer of grime from the last year.

Catching his breath, still raspy, he demanded, "Who sent you?" As if he didn't know. He awaited her confirmation, and got it.

"The smoking man."

He choked off a laugh before it could develop. One hand taketh, the other giveth, casting the old bastard as God. If Krycek's conception of God included Hell as His domain.

Not surprisingly, it did.

Her voice broke into his ironic thoughts. "He's dying."

That brought his head up. What of the shape-shifters? And the hybridization experiments that had killed Diane and nearly killed Mulder? How could the old man have gone downhill so fast? The experiments must have failed. He felt a savage satisfaction at the thought.

The bastard couldn't die fast enough.

Toweling off with the rags the guard threw at him, he dressed in the clothes Marita had brought him. It felt strange not to feel bugs crawling in the folds of the material. His crotch itched, and he resisted the urge to scratch. Get the fuck out of Tunisia, get into a real shower and delouse himself.

Then he'd see to the cigarette smoking son of a bitch.

**Three days later, FBI Headquarters, Washington DC**

The bean counter was serious. Mulder stared at the man, sitting in his bland suit with his bland expression and his bland eyes behind his bland glasses, and seriously considered throttling him with his bland necktie.

Did the idiot seriously think that the Truth was to be found in a cubicle at NASA? Wading through SETI printouts? Barely restraining himself from leaning over the desk and force-feeding the accountant his own cost analysis sheets, Mulder practically levitated from the chair and stomped out of the office.

By the time he got to the basement, he could breathe again without that strange whistling sound as the air compressed through his teeth. As he walked into the office and faced Scully, he could actually unclench his jaw far enough to talk. It was a close thing.

He made a joke about assaulting the accountant, seeing complete understanding in Scully's big blue eyes. Before they could launch into creative ways of padding the expenses that would make a traditional X File look, well, traditional, the telephone rang.

Billy Miles' voice took him back. Seven years, to the beginning of his partnership with Scully, in fact. Billy's voice was shaking. They both responded with instinctive support. Scully sounded positively motherly. A distinct change from her initial reaction to their first Oregon adventure.

But then, they'd both been through a lot in the ensuing seven years.

When Billy cut the connection abruptly, Mulder's trouble-radar pinged in four part harmony. He was gathering his coat and heading for the door as he spoke. "More alien abductions, Scully."

She moved in sync with him. "I don't know how we could possibly justify the expense."

He carefully controlled his smile at her dry tone. "We'd probably turn up nothing." He held the door for her.

"Let's go waste some money," she declared as she sailed through the door.

He was behind her all the way.

**One day later, Washington DC**

The flight in to Dulles was uneventful. Krycek hung back and watched as Marita handled all the details, taking care of their rental car, passing them through customs. He shifted his left shoulder, settling his new prosthetic arm more firmly in place. It felt good, better than the crap he'd had foisted off on him in Moscow. The cup under his stump had decent padding, and the straps were wider and better adjusted so they didn't cut into his skin. It felt almost like a shoulder holster. Looked, almost, like a real hand.

His balance was a little off after a year with only one arm, and the new one was damned heavy, but he adapted quickly. He always had. By the time they were climbing the stairs to the Cancerman's apartment, he was moving with his old lethal grace. Marita noticed. She always did. She didn't mention it.

He didn't, either.

His first glimpse of the old man was a shocker. She'd said he was dying, but he looked like he'd already died. He had a trachea tube stuck in the base of his throat, and his voice was the barest whisper. He sounded like a snake. It suited him better than the soothing tones he used to have.

"I was worried about you, Alex." False concern gleamed in those rheumy eyes.

"Cut the crap, old man." It was hard to keep the bile between his teeth, but Krycek didn't say everything he wanted to say. If he had, he'd've killed the old man, and he wanted to hear what the bastard had to say for himself before he snuffed him.

"I heard about your," the old man paused to gasp in breath, "incarceration."

Krycek nearly ripped the remnants of the old man's lungs out. "You had me thrown _in_ that hell hole!"

"You were trying to sell something that was mine, were you not?"

He lost the thread of the conversation as he stifled several possible answers to that question. He was owed. He'd more than sacrificed, and he was owed. Besides, while the old man was never to know it, there'd been a deeper purpose behind that attempted sale. He was in a fight for his life, in a fight for the continuance of the entire human species. He'd made some strange allies, and he was, as usual, in such deep cover he'd never see the light of day. But his motives were his own, and none of the old man's fucking business. So Krycek kept his tongue still and listened.

The old man was hissing something about putting the past behind them and moving forward. Fine. He was all for that. Then he said something that made the fine hair on the nape of Krycek's neck stand up.

Revive the Project? Rebuild the collaboration with the aliens who were planning to use Earth as a nesting place, and the human race as nursery food for their larvae? His mind began to race. He listened, and he appeared to agree, but plans were building, even as he nodded, even as he played his part.

An accident ... an opportunity. Now, to find a way to make the most of it. Alex Krycek was a past expert at making the most of next to nothing, and from the sound of it, this could be a fucking gold mine.

**The next day, Bellefleur, Oregon Police Department**

Billy Miles hadn't really changed all that much since the last time Mulder had seen him. Filled out a little, heavier beard shadow, gold ring on the thin third finger of his left hand. More ghosts in his eyes. He didn't quite know how to phrase the question, but eventually he got it out.

The response he received wasn't encouraging. He shrugged one shoulder, a tiny gesture, support and understanding radiating from him. He'd been where the kid was, himself, too often. He knew.

"You find the UFO and he won't be able to deny the truth." He did his best to reassure the kid. Though God knew, evidence hadn't helped Mulder a hell of a lot in the past. Still, hope sprang eternal. Billy didn't look convinced. If anything, he looked even more upset.

"I hope that's all it is."

Detective Miles came up behind them then, and Billy quieted down. Mulder looked from one to the other. There was something not quite right about the detective. Mulder's spidey sense was tingling. It could just be the return to one of the most important cases from his past.

Or it could be something darker.

They piled into their rental sedan and followed the blue and white out along the road. When they got to the scene where the deputy had disappeared, it was disturbingly familiar. Mulder parked along the shoulder and stepped out.

Directly onto a _very_ familiar orange X marked on the pavement.

"Deja vu all over again," he muttered. He had the weird suspicion that his life was caught in some kind of loop, and he was doomed to chase the same old ghosts for the rest of his career. Short as that might be by the time the bean counters got done with him.

His father was as unhelpful as Billy had hinted he'd be. There was definitely something shady going on. By the fourth or fifth brush-off, Mulder was getting pissed off. Trailing the detective to the other side of the road where Scully knelt, picking up shell casings, he overheard Miles ask, "What was he shooting at?"

"Probably nothing." He couldn't help himself. Miles glared at him.

"Nothin'?"

He _really_ couldn't help himself. "Nothing's all you seem to find out here, detective." If the guy shot him, he could shoot back ... and if he bled green, Mulder'd know what was wrong. Of course, if he bled red, the bean counters wouldn't need to close him down. Billy'd do it for them.

When the police had stalked off, Billy much more hesitantly than his father, Mulder and Scully headed off to interview the deputy's wife. Scully didn't say much, but she was pale. He knew it couldn't have been easy coming back here. The little pit of slag that used to be pavement next to the bullets brought back too many harsh memories for both of them.

Especially for her.

A wisecrack wouldn't work this time, and he couldn't think of anything serious to say that wouldn't sound hopelessly sappy, so he did what he did best -- he kept his mouth shut and one eye on his partner. By the time they got to the deputy's home, she was looking a little better.

A slim, dark-haired woman opened the door, and Mulder didn't hear Scully introducing them to her. He knew the woman. Recognized her, at any rate. "Theresa? Theresa Hoese?"

The world just kept getting smaller and smaller.

It was a short interview. She didn't know much, but she had a history they all shared to one extent or another. Mulder watched her place her infant on Scully's lap while she went to fetch pictures of her missing husband. Mulder watched Scully.

With the child.

It hit him again, with the force of a fist to his solar plexus. Scully was the closest thing he had to family left alive. In many ways, she was closer than any family he'd had when they _were_ still alive. Seeing her with the child she couldn't have, and wanted so much, made his heart hurt. She deserved better than this.

They all did.

He was quiet the rest of the day. She didn't say much, either. She still looked tired.

Trying his best to concentrate on the case, Mulder lay in bed that night, staring at photographs. Lots of photographs. The man had been through hell, that much was obvious. The markings on his neck, arms, back, legs, and torso were plain, and brutal. His memory flashed back to scenes from his own past he'd just as soon forget : strapped to a slab in a Russian gulag, while sentient black oil seeped into his eyes, nose and mouth; fighting an assassin that shifted form and face with a thought; bright lights and helplessness; mental acceleration and psychological deconstruction out of his worst nightmares; micro-organisms in his blood that made him something more, and something less, than he had once been. The thought struck him that he wasn't completely human anymore.

He wasn't quite sure what he was.

For the first time in a long time, he allowed himself to think of the ones he missed. Not his father, really, or his mother, though he did regret the missed opportunities to connect. Missed by both of them. But he did miss Samantha. Dead, or so he truly believed. Deep Throat, who'd manipulated him and used him, and one of the few whom he'd actually trusted. Scully, as she had been, when faith and humor allied with fierce intellect hadn't yet been worn down by so many losses. Diane, who'd believed, and used him as well, and paid with her life to save his.

Krycek. One person he didn't know if he wanted to hold onto or kill. The man had come to him over a year ago and offered a wild version of Truth, with the evidence to back it up, and proposed an alliance. One Mulder had worked hard to pull off, and dragged his partner and his boss into as well. Then the rat bastard had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Mulder didn't know if the rebellion between the shifting aliens and the oil aliens was still ongoing, or if the oil aliens had won, or if the death of the conspirators en masse had been the final strike for the humans in the equation. He didn't know a fucking thing, except that Krycek had dropped out of sight again, and pulled the rug out from under Mulder's feet when he did.

Again.

A knock at the door interrupted his meandering thoughts, and he hauled himself out of bed and opened it to find Scully shivering on his doorstep. She looked awful.

"What's wrong, Scully? You look sick." She looked ready to keel over at any minute, was what she looked like. She was so pale her freckles stood out like beacon lights against her skin.

"I don't know what's wrong." Like the doctor she was, she recited symptoms. Vertigo, chills, the inability to get warm.

Mulder tucked her into bed, scattering photographs everywhere, uncaring of the evidence. Molding the comforter around her, he curled up behind her, adding his body heat to the insulation from the thin covers. She was so small against him, shaking, her head tucked against her chest like a bird trying to keep warm in a high wind.

She reminded him so strongly of Samantha. As Sam would have been, given the chance to be.

His thoughts sighed out of his mouth. "It's not worth it, Scully."

"What?" Her voice was as thin as the shoulders under his hand.

"I want you to go home." I want you far away from this. I want you safe.

"No, Mulder, I'm going to be fine."

"No, no." Neither one of them were fine. They hadn't been for a long time. "I've been thinking about it." Not as much as I should have. "Looking at you today, holding that baby. Knowing everything that's been taken away from you." Because of me. "The chance for motherhood, your health, and that baby." He kissed her softly, comforting himself as much as her. "You know, maybe they're right."

She was warming up, not shaking as much as she had been. She cuddled back against him, trusting as a child. Safe. For now.

"Who's right?" she asked, her voice a little stronger.

"The FBI. Maybe what they say is true." It was a hell of a concession, coming from him. "But for all the wrong reasons," he continued. "It's the personal costs that are too high. There's so much more you need to do in your life." And you can't do it with me. "There's so much more than this." He lifted a hand and brushed the bangs off her face. Her skin was warm to his touch. Whatever it had been that had chilled her to the bone was gradually wearing off. "There has to be an end, Scully." He kissed her gently again, feeling the slender blade of her shoulder beneath his lips, grieving at the evidence of her frailty. There had to be an end to it. Or it would be the end of her. And he didn't think he could stand that particular loss.

He wouldn't fail her the way he'd failed Samantha. Wouldn't wait for a ghost to tell him Scully had died, too.

 

Krycek stared at the light burning from the single cabin where Scully had just joined Mulder. For an instant, hatred surged through him. She had no right. Mulder was _his_.

Then sanity washed back. Mulder loved Scully, there was no doubt of that. But he'd never been in love with her. The proof, if any had been needed, was staring right back at him through the high powered binoculars he had trained on Mulder's bed. No man who loved a woman would tuck her into bed fully clothed, then lay on the outside of the blanket to snuggle up with her. That was the action of a brother with a sister. Not a man with a woman he wanted.

He'd done some background checking on his favorite target as soon as he'd had a half hour alone and access to his intelligence web. Mulder'd been okay, if withdrawn, over the past year. Scully had had some strange moments, including an unscheduled field trip with the cigarette smoking bastard and flirtations with Buddhism and New Age crap. There'd even been an over-nighter at Mulder's apartment, with inconclusive results. If they had slept together, it hadn't made much of an impression on either of them. They'd had an outing to Hollywood, and kept separate suites. Going by the results his moles gave him, Mulder showed more signs of having an affair with Skinner than Scully. Krycek grinned.

Shaking off his usual preoccupation with Mulder, he lowered his binoculars and picked up his cell phone. Punching in numbers from memory, he waited for the caretaker to give the telephone to his nominal boss. When the breathy rasp came over the line, he growled at it.

"In spite of a great deal of effort," he fucking _hated_ the woods, they brought back too many memories of bloodthirsty Siberian peasants, "no one seems to be able to find this UFO of yours." If it exists outside your diseased imagination, he implied.

"Of course they can't," the old man wheezed. Krycek nearly cursed him, but forced himself to reply calmly.

"You know why? 'Cause it's _not here_." Heavy sarcasm laced the words.

"It's there, Alex. I'm certain of it." The words were clearly a struggle to get out. Krycek sincerely wished the bastard would choke to death. "Hidden in plain sight."

Bullshit. "You listen to me. If you're gonna play games, the two of them, Mulder and Scully, they're gonna beat me to it." If it actually existed, Mulder would find it. And Scully would authenticate the damned thing.

"Are you saying that Mulder and Scully are looking for the UFO?"

No shit, Sherlock. Krycek closed his eyes briefly. Dealing with the old man was like trying to hold fog, only instead of it dissolving in his hand, it would _dissolve_ his hand. "They're looking for a missing deputy."

"Well, they're looking for the right thing, but in the wrong place."

"You sent me looking for a ship." Krycek was fed up with the old man's games.

"Find the deputy, find the ship."

Before Krycek could tell the old bastard precisely what he thought of him, a click sounded and he found himself listening to a dial tone. It was just as well. A year in the pestilence of that prison had shortened his patience, and he needed to regain it if he was going to survive this. He had an alliance to rebuild, if it was at all possible. For the future of the goddamned planet, not to mention saving his own sorry ass, he'd do his best to make sure it was possible.

He sat in the darkness, watching as Scully fell asleep, watching Mulder tucked up behind her, staring off into the distance. Mulder didn't need a lot of sleep, either. Maybe it was a side effect of being inhabited by the oil alien.

Maybe it was one too many nightmares.

Eventually he decided against approaching Mulder directly. For one thing, Scully was there, and she'd get in the way of progress, especially with Mulder getting all mother-hen over her. For another, there were too many explanations, and there wasn't time enough for any of them. For a third, if he saw Mulder and didn't rip his clothes off and fuck him through the floor, the frustration just might have them at one another's throats. And he somehow couldn't see Scully standing by patiently while Krycek fucked the madness from his system long enough to be able to put together a coherent sentence.

No. Much better plan would be to use his trump card.

The next afternoon, he let himself into Walter Skinner's office through the back door.

The ex-marine nearly attacked him. He was prepared for it. His right hand raised just far enough for Skinner to see the small, shiny box clutched in his fingers, his thumb directly over the sliding lever on the front. Skinner froze.

"I don't want to hurt you. I can. You know that. Will you listen?"

Skinner stared at the control box for the nano-technology that could take over his blood in a matter of moments. Krycek could see him mentally measuring the distance between them. He almost smiled.

"By the time you get it away from me, I'll have pushed the dead man's switch. You know what that is, Skinner? That's the little button under my index finger. Once I push it, the nanos start building, and they can't be stopped. You don't want that." He stared intently at Mulder's boss. "Neither do I."

"What do you want, Krycek?" Skinner ground out.

"To renew our alliance."

Skinner looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "It's been a year. Why now?"

"Long story," Krycek wouldn't get into it, either. "I've been out of commission. But I'm back now, and time is critical." One eyebrow raised at him. He nodded. "I need you to get me to Mulder." Krycek leaned back against the wall. "Marita," he invited. His other ally stepped into the room behind him.

"We have a proposition," she said quietly. Skinner slowly sat back down behind his desk. Marita moved forward, taking a seat across from him. Krycek remained where he was, safely out of reach of any sudden moves. As she began to talk, he could see Skinner calming, thinking, understanding.

He was in.

 

The next morning, Mulder shook Scully awake. She gave him a sheepish look and he offered her his toothbrush. They hit the road to Theresa's house to interview her further. Nothing more was said of Scully's symptoms the previous night, but she caught him visually inspecting her one too many times.

"I'm _fine_, Mulder," she told him forcefully.

"Okay," he agreed mildly. She didn't look fine.

"Just a little tired."

Uh-huh. He didn't push it. She'd tell him when she wanted to, and not before. The scene that met them at the house distracted him completely.

A crowd had gathered, complete with police cars with flashing sirens, a bunch of curious looky-lous, an ambulance, and an officer carrying a crying child out of the house. Theresa's child. Mulder's eyes narrowed and he shouldered his way through the clump of busy bodies into the house. Through the signs of struggle in the living room, along the stairs. Into the nursery.

"Scully," he called out. It was there, on the carpet. Burn marks like those they'd found on the pavement. "The floor. What do you see? The same thing as out on the road." She knelt to poke at it, and he continued more quietly, "You've seen it before."

"We both have," she agreed.

Mulder sighed and turned back, going out to the car. Slumping into the driver's seat, he stared moodily out at the bystanders. They'd been there. They'd taken her, as they'd taken so many others. Peripherally he was aware of Scully coming up to the car, but someone else had caught his eye. A boy. Staring at the house as if he was seeing a nightmare made flesh. Mulder was out of the car and moving before he was aware of making the decision. That kid knew something.

When he tried to run, that just proved it.

Billy Miles came up beside him, and between them they cornered the kid. The boy was distraught.

"They took Gary! He was just gone!"

Son of a bitch. A witness. Mulder latched on to him, watching Billy take off after his father, but needing to find out what the boy Richie had seen. He hustled the kid into the car along with Scully and they drove back to the mountain. Richie talked all the way, nearly babbling about how Mr. Miles had told them there wasn't any crash, but Gary'd just known there was something there, and they'd gone back to check it out, and he'd been nervous, but they'd stuck together, then he'd seen something and yelled for Gary but Gary wasn't there. Mulder listened to the stream of words and pulled out the salient facts.

Walking down the slope toward where the boys had been searching, Mulder questioned him further. Richie was eager to help. He was clearly terrified for his friend.

"I was shining my flashlight in the dark," he said, "looking for the UFO. The beam hit this spot in space, like it bent the light."

A shield of some kind? Mulder prodded him. "Then what happened?"

"I called for Gary." Richie's voice started to shake slightly. "Flashlight got hot."

He'd dropped it when it hurt his hand. He led Mulder over to where he thought he'd dropped it and they found a burnt out casing of melted plastic and twisted metal. Mulder took a deep breath. Something sure as hell was going on around here, and it certainly looked like aliens. Detective Miles' behavior was looking more and more suspicious all the time.

"Scully!" he called.

She didn't answer. He wheeled around and headed instinctively for the last place he'd seen her. "Scully? Scully!" She was lying on the pine needles. For an instant, he thought she was dead. She was so pale. So still. Then her lips parted, and she gasped for breath. He was kneeling beside her, holding her head up, holding her against him, as quickly as he could move. "Want some water?"

Richie's voice floated down to him. "What happened to her?"

Mulder didn't look away from his partner. "Can you just get her some water?" And stop asking me stupid questions I can't answer? He looked questioningly at Scully.

"I just ... hit the ground." She looked dazed.

"Lie still." His eyes roved over her, looking for signs of injury. Nothing was obvious.

"Why is this happening to me?" Her voice sounded like a little girl's. "What the hell's going on?" With a grown-up Scully's temper.

"I don't know." But there was one thing he did know. "These aren't just random abductions, Scully. We've got to warn Billy Miles of that."

She wasn't following him. "Warn him of what?"

He looked down at her solemnly. "These abductees aren't just systematically being taken. They're not coming back."

He had to get her out of there.

She struggled to her feet, her concern showing on her face. He helped her up the slope, waving Richie off as they headed for the road. Mulder looked at the scavenged Dixie cup half filled with water, a twig floating in the top of it, that Richie tentatively offered him for Scully. Couldn't say the kid hadn't tried. He smiled weakly, shook his head on Scully's behalf, and hustled both of them into the car.

They let Richie off a few blocks from Billy's home. There was no telling what they'd find when they got there, and Bellefleur had lost too many of its young people already. Letting themselves in through the front door, already ajar, he listened to the silence and called out Billy's name. Scully repeated the call, more strongly.

Nothing but silence.

The aliens had claimed another abductee.

With all leads cold, Mulder and Scully packed it in and headed home.

**Two days later, FBI Headquarters, Washington DC**

Krycek heard the thump of the basketball rebounding off the ceiling before they rounded the corner. Sounded like Mulder was taking the latest fiasco with his usual insouciance. He gestured for Marita to hang back, and nodded Skinner ahead of him. The A.D. paused in the doorway. Krycek kept him in sight as he talked to Mulder. He was almost certain Skinner wouldn't double-cross them, but he wouldn't give him the chance to warn the agent. It was too important. It would be a waste to have to kill Skinner so early in the game.

Besides, it might make Mulder even more recalcitrant than usual if his boss was twepped in front of him.

"Agent Mulder," Skinner began softly. The basketball thumped on the desk.

"What's our punishment this time? Thumbscrews or forty lashes?"

Krycek smiled in spite of himself at the wry humor in Mulder's tone. The man sounded more relaxed, or perhaps resigned, than he had since Krycek had first met him. Skinner shrugged, and Mulder continued.

"C'mon in, Walter."

Krycek's brows lifted. Maybe there was something to the Hollywood rumor after all. Perhaps he'd be terminating Skinner sooner rather than later.

"Sit a spell. This could be the last time you take a trip down to these offices."

Skinner didn't move. "You went to Oregon." It didn't sound accusatory. Mulder sounded like he took it as lightly as it was given.

"Guilty as charged." His voice deepened. "And if they're coming down on you for that, I'm sorry. I truly am." The basketball stopped thumping.

"Fortunately, they think that I make a contribution to the Bureau."

Oh, cold. But then, Skinner did have a rep for the incisive put-down. Not to mention the ability to be stone cold. Krycek had the handcuff scar on his wrist to prove it. One more little score to settle, when their common enemy was defeated. If they didn't all get wiped off the face of the Earth first. Or get turned into kibble for alien larvae.

"Oh, yeah, stick to a budget and they say you're making a contribution. But push the limits of your profession and they say you're out of control." The light tone didn't quite mask the bitterness beneath.

Skinner gave him another harsh truth in response. "You could bring home a flying saucer and have an alien shake hands with the President. What it comes down to, Agent Mulder, is ..." he actually sounded regretful, "they don't like you."

Newsflash, anyone? Krycek's own pitch black sense of humor was kicking in. So was the edge he always got directly before any confrontation with Mulder.

"Well, we didn't bring home a flying saucer. Or an alien," Mulder admitted.

"Yeah, so I've been told," Skinner answered. Krycek took a step forward. Skinner responded to the cue.

Krycek's eyes locked with Mulder. For a second, he saw what he hadn't thought he'd ever see again -- a flash of pure unadulterated heat. In that instant, the heat transmuted into rage, and by the time Mulder got around the corner of his desk it took all of Skinner's considerable muscle to keep him from attacking Krycek.

He wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed. There was a perverse thrill to be gained from having the shit kicked out of him by Mulder. It was matched only by the thrill of fucking the sense out of the man. When he couldn't have the latter, he'd take the former. He'd never claimed to be sane. Tuning into the conversation, wrenching his brain out of his balls, he heard Skinner trying to get through the red haze that was practically visible around Mulder's head.

"Agent Mulder! I think you should listen to him."

Yeah, Mulder. Listen. Or I really will off your boss right now. Krycek swallowed the threat and concentrated on his mission. He stared hard at Mulder, holding his attention. Willing him to pay attention. Understand. Agree.

"You've got every reason to want to see me dead." Among other things. "But you've got to listen to me now. You have a singular opportunity." Don't fuck it up, Mulder, he urged with his eyes.

"Here, or you wanna step outside?"

The temptation was almost unbearable. Krycek swallowed the sheer lust rising in him and forced his voice back to steadiness. Before he could answer, Marita stepped in.

"Agent Mulder. Cancerman is dying." Mulder stilled and stared at her, then glanced back at Krycek, an involuntary request for confirmation. He gave the tiniest nod.

"His last wish is to rebuild his project, to have us revive the Conspiracy," she continued. "It all begins in Oregon."

"The ship that collided with that Navy plane," Krycek put in, finally able to control his voice. "It's in those woods."

Mulder looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. Again. "There's no ship in those woods."

"Yeah, it's there," Krycek contradicted him. "Cloaked in an energy field. While he mops up the evidence."

The struggle between distrust and belief was painted across Mulder's face. "Who?" he spat.

"The alien bounty hunter," Krycek returned swiftly. "Billy Miles. Theresa Hoese. Her husband. He's eliminating proof of all the tests." He kept to himself the other common thread between the people who were disappearing. That would be for later, when he had time alone with Mulder. He knew just how he was going to play it. Mulder had given him the key when he'd played big brother to his partner in that cabin in Oregon. "We were asking ourselves ... we're asking ourselves, where are they? They're right there," he answered his own question. "They're right under our noses. I'm giving you the chance to change that. To hold the proof."

"Why me?" Mulder cut to the heart of the matter. "And why now?"

Krycek gave him one truth, one he could believe. "I want to damn the soul of that cigarette-smoking son of a bitch."

He could see by the light in Mulder's eyes that he'd bought it. He didn't have to add the other compelling reason.

_Because I want you_.

"Mulder?"

Scully's voice broke into the odd paralysis between them. He glanced over at the doorway and saw her. She was looking at him, at them all, as if demons from Hell had risen when she wasn't looking and invaded her partner's office.

From there, the pace accelerated. Mulder called her in. Skinner started explaining. Mulder called the Lone Gunmen. Marita added her two cents. Mulder explained some more, when he got done cryptically inviting Frohicke and the gang to drop by with everything they had on the Bellefleur incident.

Krycek stayed in the background, and watched.

Too much time passed as the conspiracy theorists and the agents quibbled over geek-speak. Finally, he had to bring them back to the point.

"Listen, it's not going to be there forever."

Marita must have been feeling the same urgency, because she immediately backed him up. "As we stand here talking, it's rebuilding itself."

He felt absolutely no surprise when Scully suddenly wheeled and walked out of the room. He'd expected it before now. He watched Mulder trail after her, and took a deep breath. When they came back in, he'd know if he was going to be able to pull off the second part of his plan. The technobabble from the geeks faded into the background as he stared at the door.

A few minutes later, Mulder walked back in, Scully behind him, a mulish look on her face. Mulder came to a stop beside Skinner.

"So, sir, up for a little walk in the woods?"

Triumph welled up in Krycek. This was going to work. He could practically taste it.

Two hours later, finally finished at the Bureau, he followed Mulder home. The flight he and Skinner were booked on left at nine the next morning. This was the best chance Krycek would have to get the man alone and finalize the rest of his plan. He didn't bother knocking, just slipped the lock with a wire and let himself in. His host was waiting for him.

At least this time Mulder greeted with an opened bottle of beer instead of the business end of a loaded Glock with the safety off.

"Long time no see," he greeted Krycek, absolutely deadpan.

"Too long," Krycek agreed.

"One good reason not to kill you would be one more than I've got right now," Mulder told him, handing him the beer. Krycek stared down into the liquid, wondering if it was poisoned. Shrugging, figuring if he'd survived the food at the Tunisian prison for a year nothing Mulder threw at him would kill him, he swallowed half the bottle before taking a breath.

Then he set the bottle down on the table behind him, hooked a finger in Mulder's collar right behind the knot of his tie, and pulled him forward into a kiss. His chances were fifty-fifty that Mulder would hit him or kiss him back. He'd take either one.

Mulder punched him in the stomach.

He folded with the force of the blow, all his breath coming out into Mulder's mouth. Before he could regain it, Mulder had him pinned to the side of the couch and was kissing him as if his life depended on it. Krycek could relate.

He was dizzy and nearly blacking out from lack of oxygen before Mulder finally let him catch a breath. No doubt that was the plan. Mulder was speaking, words running together in a furious hiss under his breath, as he pulled and tugged at Krycek's clothing. Words like killer, and fool, and goddamned son of a bitch, and two timing traitorous rat bastard all ran together, muffled by the press of that mouth he'd missed so much against his skin.

It was worse than awkward trying to undress and be undressed with his right arm stuck in the couch cushions, but Mulder didn't help, or wait until he could right himself. Anger and need combined to turn all of Mulder's admirable determination to one object -- getting Krycek naked and opened as soon as humanly possible. Not that Krycek was objecting.

The world swung on its axis and he found himself draped over the arm of the couch, his jeans tangled around his boots, his prosthetic arm caught between the padded cushion and his stomach, his right hand clutching at the back of the couch to keep himself from being pitched over the side with Mulder's enthusiasm. His jacket and shirt lay halfway on the other side of the room where Mulder had tossed them. His knees were sinking into the couch seat and he couldn't move to save his life.

He didn't want to move. Then he'd wake up, and he'd been dreaming of precisely this for too damned long to want it to end so soon.

Mulder's fingers were in him, slick with spit, then Mulder's tongue, and he muffled a scream against his biceps as Mulder's cock followed. It had been a long time since he'd been fucked, and it hurt like hell. His ass clenched instinctively and his breath hitched in his lungs. His legs tensed and his toes curled. His spine arched and his throat tightened.

It was perfect.

Long fingers were digging into his shoulders, holding him in place as strong hips pistoned against him, slamming him into the hard plastic of his prosthetic arm, trapping his erection painfully between his own pelvic bone and the unyielding limb. Mulder pumped into him hard, not giving him a chance to breathe, or move, or do anything but take it and like it.

Love it.

For the first time since the last time he'd been with Mulder, Krycek stopped thinking. About anything. His universe and all the complexities of his life disappeared into the white-hot pleasure-pain of the man plowing into him, the hot breath on the back of his neck, the teeth in his shoulder, the hands bruising his chest. He lowered his face against the soft cushion and screamed, low, continuously, and let himself drift away into the connection between their bodies until it was the only thing that existed.

It was over too soon. Mulder's hands dropped from his nipples to his hips, clamping down on them and drawing him back until Krycek's back was plastered against Mulder's chest. Mulder shoved into him and came, and the unexpected freedom his own cock found in the space now available for it between his hips and the arm of the couch was his undoing. He spasmed in response, coming hard, thrusting himself back as strongly as Mulder was pushing forward. There was a hoarse cry behind him, and Krycek thought it sounded like his name.

Or a prayer.

Maybe both.

Mulder pulled out as fast as he'd pushed in, and Krycek couldn't contain a whimper at the burn of the flesh disconnecting. A hand brushed against his buttock, surprisingly gentle as it touched his crease, then it was gone. The air was cold against him.

He struggled to turn, and Mulder reached over matter-of-factly and righted him. Krycek lay there, jeans still puddled around his ankles, limbs akimbo, sticky cock flopping against the side of his thigh, mouth open to draw panting breaths, and stared up at Mulder.

Brown hair stuck up at all angles. His cheeks and throat were flushed, and his mouth was swollen. His eyes looked sleepy. A surge of blood made its way to Krycek's cock. Mulder noted the twitch of interest and shook his head.

"Fucking insatiable," he commented, sprawled in his own corner of the couch.

"Been a long, dry year," Krycek allowed.

"Tell me about it." It was more command than request. Krycek actually considered it, then sighed and gave him the Reader's Digest Condensed version. They didn't have time for the full litany of horrors.

"Cancerman caught me passing technical information to the Resistance. I covered by saying they were businessmen interested in advanced technology and I was selling it to them. He didn't like that, said it was his information, not mine to sell, and he had me thrown into a hell hole of a prison in Tunisia." Mulder stared hard at him. Krycek glanced at him, then resolutely stared off into the distance. He didn't trust himself to look directly at Mulder when he told him about this. Mulder was too good at reading his eyes.

"I stayed alive the best I could for the past year, then Marita Covarrubias showed up with the news that he was dying and my release had been arranged. We went to see him, and he spun his story about the alien ship crashing, how it was Roswell and Corona all over, and this was our chance to start the whole mess up again."

"He didn't catch on that you were working with the Resistance?" Mulder pressed him. Krycek shook his head.

"He's pretty hard to read, but no, he didn't. He's a collaborator through and through. He had no idea I was working for the Resistance. He had no trouble believing that I just got greedy."

There was silence for awhile, and Krycek could feel Mulder watching him. It turned him on, and he took a deep breath, fighting the need to touch him again. Forcing his mind onto more important, if not more urgent, matters, he shifted. Caught his balls between his thighs and pressed hard. Pain arced through them and his erection subsided.

Beside him, Mulder's breath quickened.

Krycek started to talk before he could get caught back up in the cycle of arousal. "There's another reason the alien bounty hunter is picking those specific abductees, Mulder." He glanced over. Mulder's eyes had lifted from his crotch to his face. Progress, of a sort.

"What? And why didn't you mention it when everyone was gathered at Headquarters?"

"They don't know all the details, and it's safer for them if they don't. All the abductees taken in Oregon have suffered electro-encephalitic trauma. Their brains have been readied, primed, so to speak."

"Primed for what?" Mulder was leaning toward him now, as turned on by the facts surrounding the aliens as he had been by Krycek's body. It was an amusing and disturbing fact.

"Primed to be able to communicate with the aliens."

"Like me," Mulder thought aloud.

"Not like Scully," Krycek continued for him. Mulder shot him an interrogatory look. "They're not after breeders, Mulder." Mulder's look melted into a glare, but Krycek continued to feed him the truth. "They're after information. And collaborators. The oil aliens need help fighting the rebellious shape shifters. They're planning on using humans not only as cannon fodder in their little civil war, and breakfast food for their nurseries, but spies against the Resistance. You want to keep Scully safe."

Mulder nodded, still staring at him. "Yeah?"

"Keep her away from this. She's not strong enough to handle it."

After a long moment, Mulder nodded his agreement. He'd obviously been thinking the same thing, very recently.

"You have a plan in that cesspool passing for a mind of yours," Mulder informed him. Krycek smiled sweetly at him. Mulder blinked.

"Always. Turnabout's fair play, or in this case, what goes around, comes around."

"You want me to go in." It was a statement, not a question.

"We have our own eyes and ears among the shape-shifters, undercover on some of the ships. But we need a human, one with no illusions about what he's facing, to go deep. Find out what the oil aliens are planning. Pass that information back to us here on Earth so we can counter it."

"You want to set up a sting."

The man was brilliant. There was no doubt about that. Krycek grinned at him again. Mulder blinked again, and unconsciously moved closer.

"You up for the job, Agent Mulder? The undercover role of a lifetime." His voice lowered to a whisper as Mulder moved closer, until they were barely touching from knee to chest.

"I'm in the game," Mulder answered, the moment before his mouth covered Krycek's again.

He pulled the warm weight over the top of him with his good arm, tried his damnedest not to whack Mulder over the head with his prosthetic arm, and let himself go for the ride. Tomorrow was soon enough for reality. He'd take the dream as long as he could get it.

The next day, Krycek tied up the last loose end. As he stepped over the broken body of the old man crumpled at the base of the stairway, his eyes were firmly fixed on the future.

**Ascension day, Bellefleur, Oregon**

Skinner wasn't the most talkative travelling companion Mulder had ever known, but that was a good thing. He had too much on his mind, and the older man was too intuitive, to risk too much conversation. As they flew across the country then drove through the mountains to the crash site, he concentrated on what lie ahead.

And what had gone down the night before.

Pulling over by the big orange X on the pavement was a relief. He didn't know how much longer he could scare himself back out of an incipient erection by reminding himself that Walter Skinner was extremely observant. He knew his rep at the Bureau -- Spooky got turned on by little green men. He didn't want to give any credence to the false rumor.

Krycek had never been green in his life, and not even his worst enemies could truthfully label the body parts under consideration 'little.'

Shaking off the thought, forcing his mind to concentrate on what was to come instead of what already had, he walked around to the trunk and began to pull out equipment. Skinner, to his surprise, actually grumbled.

"This is starting to feel like the snipe hunt I was afraid of."

Mulder tossed him an innocent look. "No such thing as a snipe, sir." Skinner didn't appreciate the attempt at levity.

"Hey, you know, my ass is on the line here too, Agent Mulder."

Not in the same league of risk at all, Walter, Mulder thought. Aloud, he reassured his boss, "I know that." You have no idea, do you? No. Of course you don't. At least I hope to God you don't.

Having reassured himself as well, he set out to assemble the laser web with which the Gunmen had equipped him. Taking out the control box after the beams were in place, he fiddled with it, trying to remember everything Byers and Langley had thrown at him about its use.

"How's it supposed to work?" Skinner asked, peering intently at the red lights shining in the darkness between the trees.

"Not exactly sure, sir," Mulder answered him honestly enough. "But, uhm, budgetarily, I'd say we're looking pretty good." He wondered how much a veteran agent went for these days, and if Skinner's pay would be docked for losing him when he got back. Given his general popularity, his boss would probably get a commendation in his record.

Concentrating fiercely on the necessity of what he was about to do, regretting the need to hurt Scully, as he knew it would, and deceive Skinner, as he was about to do, he took a deep breath. Undercover always sucked. This would, too. The stakes were just higher.

The highest.

Following the beams into the darkest shadows, he saw a point where they all seemed to stop, pooling at the end in little bulbs of laser light. That had to be it, the place where Richie said the light had bent. The place where Gary had disappeared.

The place where he would disappear.

Licking his lips, he deliberately blanked his mind to his motivations, and concentrated on the here and now. Pushing his hand into the air beyond the lights, he felt the energy take hold of him, shaking his arm, sucking him in. It was a little like walking through a thunderstorm with no rain. Every hair on his body stood up for a moment, then he was through the barrier.

They were standing there. Looking at him.

He went toward the light.

Skinner's voice faded into the background. He turned, and stilled, looking up at the circle of lights above him, washing them all in purest white. Motion rippled through the people beside him. A space opened, and a man stepped into it.

He knew that face.

Knew those eyes.

Calm washed through him. They wouldn't know. But he would find out. With the knowledge he gained, he would find a way to help the Resistance reclaim Earth's future.

There was motion, as time froze. He opened his eyes to find more light, and voices inside his head. Time untwined, then sped up, and he understood. Separated the voices into the hive mind and the workers. Separated the workers. Heard the voice he was waiting to hear.

He smiled.

He was in.

An old woman approached Krycek then walked past him, blind eyes staring through him. Her clawed hand held a small paper bag, and he followed her into an alley. He caught up with her easily. She passed him the bag. He made no sign, simply allowed his eyes to pass over her. Then he picked up the pace. Turned the corner and took up position across the street.

Ten minutes later a handsome blond man wearing dark glasses, lips compressed in a thin line, walked from the alley. He gave no sign of recognition as he passed Krycek. It wasn't necessary.

Krycek could see the tiny threads between the barely parted lips. He knew what to look for. He turned away and headed for a ratty apartment further into the city.

Langley let him in, with a scowl on his face. Krycek ignored him as usual and walked to the computer Frohicke had set up for him. The encryption programs installed on it were literally unearthly. Krycek popped the silver disk into the drive and waited patiently for the results. Lines of data began to fill the screen. Several minutes passed.

"Good stuff?" Byers finally asked from behind him. Krycek nodded once.

"He's in."

 

_Retrieval_

As memories went, this one was a doozie. Didn't do half bad as a nightmare, either.

Deep in the dark shadows of his brain, John Doggett knew that he was dreaming. Further back in the even darker shadows, he also knew it had really happened. That knowledge gave the nightmare more immediacy and a higher level of pain than he could comfortably tolerate.

Always started the same, as it had in real life. Phone call from his wife, hysteria making it hard to understand what she was screaming at him. Trying to calm her down, finally shouting at her, beating her down to silence so she could start over and let him make sense of the insanity. For it had been insanity, and had driven him nearly there before it was nominally done.

Because it was never done.

Seven years old, the glue holding his world together, more pressure than any little kid should have to put up with, but he didn't know a way around it. His son was his life in a way his wife, the FBI, even the Corps could never be. The heart of his world. Disappeared one fine March afternoon on the way home from school.

Half a lifetime later, almost full two months, Doggett found his boy. What was left of him, anyway. What the animals hadn't chewed off and the rain hadn't battered away and the mud hadn't caved in. That's where purgatory ended and hell began.

He was still screaming no when he rolled out of bed. His gun was in his hand, but there was nobody to shoot. Except maybe himself, and hadn't he thought of that a time or two? When he'd taken the blame his now ex- was more than willing to give him for not getting there in time. When he hadn't been able to bring the sons of bitches to justice for what they'd done, not that any justice short of stringing them up and letting the dogs have them was justice enough. When he closed his eyes and all he could see were holes with maggots crawling in them where his little boy's eyes used to be.

Wearily, he unclenched his fingers from the butt of the pistol and put it back in the drawer. It was almost five AM. He'd gotten almost three hours sleep. It was almost time to go to work.

Almost.

Shrugging off the thought that it was just as well he was living in the basement of Headquarters now, because there weren't any nosy parkers around to ask why the hell he was coming in to work half a shift early, he rubbed his eyes clear of grit and stuck his head under the faucet. It didn't help much, but at least he looked alert when he glanced in the mirror.

Haunted, but alert.

Ignoring that thought, trying real hard not to think at all, he dressed mechanically and fought the Beltway and trudged into work. Too often in the weeks since he'd been assigned to the X Files he'd felt like he was banging his head against a brick wall. It wasn't what he was used to. He was damned good at his job. One would never know it based on what he'd accomplished, or not accomplished, since being banished to the basement.

Sighing inaudibly, he pulled a file off the top of his inbox and stared down at the same nebulous facts that had been driving him bananas for weeks. There had to be a clue in there somewhere. Mulder'd been dying. Knew it. Might have been caught up in some kind of conspiracy. Might have been overtaken by his own rampant paranoia. Doggett tallied up the things he knew about Mulder, turning facts and opinions and ideas over in his head.

Loyal. Obstinate. Brilliant. Possibly insane. Definitely protective. Open-minded to the point of things falling out. Ability to crawl into another person's skin and brain that was unparalleled in the history of the FBI. An attitude that had even his supporters scratching their heads and covering their asses. Why had he disappeared? The more Doggett dug into it, the more he came to believe that it had been a choice, not a crime.

A sound tickled his hearing and he looked up. Mulder was standing, leaning against the file cabinets, smiling at him. Chuckling. Doggett squinted. Yeah, he could see the filing cabinets through him. He sighed again. Great. Hallucinations. Wasn't just the case profiles, it must be the office. He couldn't help but smile back. The last time he'd seen Mulder's Ghost, he'd been right on target. He couldn't help but see this latest manifestation as a good sign.

He refused to believe that he could see a man's ghost when the man wasn't dead, and he refused to believe that Mulder was dead. He'd buy it when he saw the corpse. Not before. Given some of what he'd seen and experienced, maybe not even then.

Glancing back up from the file he'd tossed back to the desk, all he saw was the dust floating in the air in front of the cabinets. Then he cocked his head. One of the drawers was slightly open. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and Doggett rose very slowly, walking over to the drawer, preternaturally alert. There was an electricity in the air he'd last felt in combat, as a Marine, when a sniper was targeting him. It had saved his life more than once. Something weird was going on.

Trusting his instincts, hoping they'd save him on this latest battlefield, he reached out to the drawer and slid it open. The files looked ruffled, and one tab was bent back slightly. He pulled the folder out and glanced through it.

The sound of the telephone ringing had him jumping a foot in the air and reaching for his gun.

Swearing at himself under his breath for being an asshole, he clutched the folder and headed back to his desk. Snatching the handset from the cradle, he took a deep breath and tried not to rip the head off the person on the other end for scaring the bejeezus out of him.

"Doggett," he barked. There was a pause from the other end, then a sheriff with a twang started talking. Doggett's eyebrows raised, and he reached for a pen. Very shortly afterward, he hung up the phone, staring at it for a moment. He glanced back at the open file he'd just pulled from the cabinet. The file about a woman and a kid from Oregon. A kid whose friend had just found the woman's body in a field in Montana.

Shit. He really hated this paranormal crap. Made him nuts. Sighing for the third time in twenty minutes, he picked the telephone back up and dialed.

"Skinner."

"Sir, this is Agent Doggett. I have a possible lead on Agent Mulder's whereabouts."

Half a second of pregnant silence, then Skinner asked, "Have you called Agent Scully?" His voice was carefully controlled. Doggett closed his eyes and pressed two fingers against the headache gathering behind the bridge of his nose.

"No, sir. I thought she might take it better coming from you."

"Where are you?"

In the background Doggett could hear material rustling. "At the office."

"I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Call her. Tell her to meet us there."

Doggett told the dial tone, "Yes, sir."

His conversation with Scully was even shorter than the one with Skinner. Doggett knew she didn't trust him. Probably didn't like him, much, either, and he couldn't say he blamed her. But he'd told her, and he meant it, that they were partners. He'd watch her back and he'd expect the same from her. And he'd do everything under the sun he could do to get Mulder back for her. He hadn't gotten there in time to save his son. He didn't want to lose this one, too. Even if it turned out he was a runner, not a kidnapping after all.

When she burst into the office she was on edge. Her whole body was vibrating like a tuning fork, and he had the notion that all it would take would be a single word and she'd shatter into a million pieces. Not wanting to be the one to say that word, he fumbled until Skinner showed up, then they headed toward the AD's office. There was as much dread as hope in her expression as she listened to the details, what few they had.

She wanted to find Mulder, yeah. She was also scared to death of what they'd find if they did. Doggett could relate. Too closely. He had to look away. Hurt to much to watch.

On the drive to the airport, he caught movement with his peripheral vision, and stared into the side mirror, trying to pinpoint it. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn't reassure him. He had cottonmouth, and the nape of his neck was still prickling. He'd relied on his instincts too long not to pay attention to them now. But no matter how hard he looked, he didn't see a damned thing.

By the time they'd boarded, his shoulders were hunched up by his ears and his eyes were starting to hurt from trying to look every direction at once. Thankfully Skinner had his hands full with Scully, so Doggett's strange reaction wasn't noticed. Burrowing into his seat, strapping himself in with hands whose fingers were white at the knuckles from tension, he mentally berated himself. Combat nerves had their place. This wasn't it. Breathing deeply, he fell back on old habits, calming himself, conserving his energy for the battle that was to come. It didn't relax him much, but it was enough to keep from jumping out of his skin, or shooting somebody, every time he heard a noise.

  
When the plane touched down in Helena, he'd regained a measure of control. Just as well. Not ten feet into the parking lot, his radar went up again. He looked around carefully but didn't see anyone suspicious. This time Skinner did give him a sideways glance. Not willing to tell his AD that he had the suspicion he was being stalked by the ghost of his current partner's probably not dead ex-partner, Doggett kept his mouth shut and his mind on business.

 

Alex Krycek was not a man to panic without cause. Even **with** cause, he was amazingly resilient. He'd lived through too many life-threatening circumstances to lose his cool unless it was something major causing it.

This counted as major.

For three weeks in a row, his Resistance contact had walked right past him. No disk, no message. No indication that Mulder was still alive. Then today, even the contact had gone missing.

A very bad sign. It fit with other signs he'd been reading, too. Abductees going missing at an alarming rate. Spies, both human and alien, disappearing with no warning. Shifters, fighters and healers, being extracted and terminated everywhere. The Resistance was losing ground.

Now, they might have lost Mulder.

It was time to close shop on this operation. Time, if not past time, to pull Mulder from the Ship and get him back to Earth. They weren't going to get any more than they already had.

Krycek intensified his observation of Scully and her newly-assigned partner, Ironass Doggett. He knew the only reason Doggett had been given the X Files was so a tried and true company man would fail. Then Kersh and his collaborator superiors would have the excuse to finally legitimately close the X Files and thereby cut off any information conduit the Resistance had within the FBI. Krycek secretly found it amusing to watch Doggett re-evaluate his entire belief system in the space of a month in X Files land. He couldn't help but wonder what the man would think the first time he saw a Ship.

Or a Gray.

Hadn't been much reaction to his first Shifter. But it was early. If things went well, Doggett would never have to see the seamier side of the fight for humanity's continued existence. If not, well, Doggett was a decent fighter and almost as protective as Mulder was. He could be useful. If not, he'd be dead. Either way, he wouldn't be an obstacle.

Peering through night glasses, he wasn't surprised to see Doggett start up from a nightmare, fling himself from his bed, dig in a drawer and bring a gun up to face god-knew-what. Krycek watched and waited. Eventually Doggett put the gun away, wandered off to get dressed and headed for FBI headquarters. He looked at his watch. Five thirty in the morning. Maybe it was something endemic to the X Files made workaholics out of the agents trapped there.

Then again, maybe not. Krycek had read the man's file. While not as bizarre as Mulder's, it held its own share of tragedy. Probably dipping into Mulder's psychoses only made Doggett's existing trauma harder to handle. He put the Tercel into gear and followed at a distance.

An hour and ten minutes later, his patience was rewarded. Scully came flying in like a bat out of hell, hot on the heels of Skinner, looking more pressed and alert than a man should be at that hour in the morning. Half an hour after that, they were on the way to Dulles.

Doggett was sharp. He nearly caught Krycek three times, once en route and twice at the airport. A judicious application of money and pathos got him a seat on the same plane the agents were flying, and Doggett nearly caught him again when they deplaned in Montana. When they stopped at the motel, Krycek waited until they left again before he checked in.

Once inside his room, he powered up his laptop and opened up a window to the Gunmen. Frohicke had the usual disgruntled expression on his face when he saw who it was, until Krycek mentioned where he was at. Then his beady little eyes gleamed. Langly nearly knocked him out of the picture.

"Helena? Oh, too cool, dude. Of course!"

"Why?" Krycek asked patiently.

Three minutes of geek-babble later, Byers actually answered him. "There have been reports of unidentified flying objects of immense size and speed, centered on the outskirts of Helena, Montana."

"Gotta love those wide open spaces," Langley tossed in from his seat at another computer.

Byers plowed on. "People who have previously reported themselves as the subjects of alien abduction and experimentation have been going missing -"

"At increasing rates," interjected Frohicke.

" -and one of the missing women,"

"Theresa Hoese, from Bellefleur, Oregon," Langley inserted helpfully.

" - has been admitted to a local hospital in Helena with severe injuries," Byers finished serenely, ignoring all the interruptions with the ease of long practice.

Krycek was doing some mental collation of his own. "What hospital?" he asked, peering back at Frohicke as suspiciously as Frohicke was peering at him. If the Grays and the Oil Aliens were returning the breeders, they might be finishing with that phase of the experimentation. And if that was the case, they might well be deep into the next phase, experimenting on those abductees who had suffered electro-encephalitic trauma. Which meant that Mulder's head was on the chopping block. Maybe literally.

Byers gave him the name of the hospital and Krycek nodded. A second window was opened and he began to run a coded program through the line. The Gunmen's picture began to break up.

"Is this the one?" Frohicke asked, more demand than question.

Krycek took a deep breath. "Yes." It was all he needed to say. All three Gunmen went quiet, staring at him. "I'll call you when I need you." When, not if.

Frohicke nodded then cut the connection. The flow of data sped up considerably as the first window closed. Within moments, Krycek had hacked through the pitiful firewall of the hospital's administrative computer. He noted grimly that one Theresa Hoese had been transferred out on her physician's instructions half an hour earlier. Transfer destination unknown. Standard M.O.

Cutting the connection before the damage could be noted and backing out as carefully as he hacked in, Krycek initiated a second connection. This one poked through the cracks in the local police department's secured computer. Within eleven minutes, Krycek had the name of the man Doggett would look too next for his answers. Along with the name came a location.

He was at Absalom's compound an hour before all hell broke loose. It gave him enough time to see a familiar Shifter speaking urgently with Absalom.

Jeremiah Smith.

The question was, which Jeremiah Smith? One of the legions on the side of the Oil Aliens, or one of the few on the side of the Resistance? Melting into the shadows, Krycek waited for the raid and kept his eye on both the raiders and the ones being raided. His patience was partially rewarded.

Mulder wasn't at the compound.

After his argument with Absalom, Smith left the rest of the milling crowd and headed for the woods. The Shifter paused beside a battered pick-up truck and hauled a blanket-wrapped bundle from the bed. Grunting silently, he heaved it over his shoulder and staggered away. Krycek moved soundlessly after him.

Less than a mile into the cover of the trees, Smith dropped his burden in the undergrowth. Pushing the blanket away from the body's face and shoulders, he arranged the limbs carefully. Krycek crept as close as he could. Smith froze, and he froze in response. Smith's head scanned slowly, side to side, and Krycek held his breath along with his position. After a few moments of hyper-alertness, the tension in the thin shoulders relaxed fractionally and Smith began to move his hands over the body in front of him.

Krycek bit back a frustrated curse. He recognized the blocky features of a Shifter's standard form, but he wasn't close enough to see if the eyes and lips had been sewn shut, and he didn't dare move closer without giving himself away. Then the air began to shimmer over the unmoving body, and Smith's back arched in strain. His hands hovered a few inches above the other's flesh, caught in the light bending over the body.

Abruptly, all the strain evaporated, and Smith bent double, panting lightly. Krycek squinted through the darkness and felt his own breath catch.

Mulder.

Yet not. Because he'd seen the body as it had originally been, and it had been the corpse of a Shifter.

His eyes closed briefly. He could see where this was going, and it wasn't going to be pretty.

Motion behind and in front of him brought him back to the present in a flash, and he practically levitated behind a large tree. Smith melted into the darkness to his left just as a group of three commandos, led by Doggett, came up on his right. He had time to see the stricken expression on Doggett's face before he fell back the way he'd come, intent on following Smith.

He'd been right. It hadn't been pretty, and it was going to get uglier.

By the time he got back to the compound, Smith had assumed another face and was among the group of rescued abductees clustered in the largest room of the main building. Most of the abductees were breeders, adolescents or children. He watched with interest as Scully picked Smith out from the crowd, undeterred by the new face he wore, and isolated him in a room at the back of the log building.

One of the black-clad FBI special agents nearly caught him as he was slipping around to the back of the building to follow the action. It was the work of a moment to slit the man's throat. He hauled the body far enough into the woods to keep it out of sight then hurried back to the compound. By the time they found it, hopefully he'd be long gone. If not, they could always blame Absalom or one of his loonies.

Not that Krycek believed they were loony. He knew otherwise. But it helped that the majority of the FBI did.

Scully was in Smith's face by the time Krycek got back, peeking in from the corner of a side window. He wasn't surprised to see her emotions so near to the surface. She was close to cracking. Before she got very far, Skinner knocked on the door. Krycek ducked out of sight, then kept ducking as something oozed out through the cracks between the logs. From his cover in the bushes, he watched as Smith re-formed, shifted to take on the appearance of Doggett, and walked into the maze of plastic draping the buildings. Krycek glanced back once at the building, then settled deeper in the bushes to wait.

It wasn't long. Within minutes, he felt the ground beneath him begin to shake. Lights flashed above him and he threw himself to the ground, rolling out of the way of stampeding feet as the abductees scrambled around in a panic. The light concentrated on the room where Smith had been held.

Deep inside Krycek, the remnants of the Black Oil stirred. The vaccine he had taken bound it at the cellular level, and so he was able to control it, but he could do nothing about the voices he heard. It sang, shrill and demanding, making his skull vibrate in sympathy. He was almost compelled to go to that light, return to his comrades, go home.

Almost.

With a final shriek of frustration at prey barely missed, the light flashed out, the voices ripped to a stop, and the ship lurched away. Krycek unclenched his teeth, certain this time he'd cracked at least one tooth grinding them together against that infernal noise, then looked up to see a dark-eyed woman in an FBI jacket staring at him with a combination of fascination and horror. He looked back, and for a moment everything he had been, everything he had done, all he carried within him shone from his eyes.

She was still throwing up when he slipped away from the mayhem and back into the shadows of the forest.

 

It had been a hell of a day, and a hell of a long one. Doggett stared blearily at the numbers ticking over on the clock beside the motel bed and realized he'd been up for twenty three hours straight. The last several had been the toughest.

Scully refused a sedative. She hadn't wanted to go to the hospital for observation either, but given the fact that they'd found her on her knees screaming her head off with tears running down her face, and the fact that she hadn't exactly had an easy pregnancy so far, he and Skinner together managed to get her in a hospital bed and sleeping. It hadn't been an easy sleep, but it was better than hysterics.

Better than facing a truth none of them wanted to face.

He stripped off numbly, draping his tie, jacket, trousers and shirt automatically over the back of the chair, toeing off his shoes and socks, tossing his wallet and laying his gun in the seat. He scrubbed a hand over his face and hair, trying to wipe the chill away, but his skin felt like rubber, and his hand felt dead.

Falling into bed in his shorts, he closed his eyes and prayed that he'd be tired enough that the nightmares would leave him alone, if only for a couple hours. His head barely hit the pillow before he was out for the count.

No luck on the nightmare front. He'd no sooner gone under before he was back at the gully where they'd found the remains of his son. Wrapped in the tattered rags of his clothes, blood at his mouth and his ears and the sockets where his eyes had been. Leaves stuck to the sticky red trails along his pale soft skin. He'd looked tiny there against the blackness of the dirt and the green brown of the underbrush. His bare feet looked cold. His fingers and toes were curled.

As Doggett stood, stone-still on the outside, screaming and crying on the inside, staring at the innocent pink sole of his son's foot, it elongated. The toes were still curled, the foot still looked strangely defenseless and oddly innocent, but it was a man's foot, not a boy's, and it wasn't his son. It was Mulder. His eyes were closed, but there was blood all over his arms, along his legs, bruises everywhere, holes in his skin, cuts too precise to be random violence, evidence of a malevolent intelligence that made the bile rise in Doggett's throat. Mulder's face was as lost as his son's had been. He tried to raise his hands. Tried to back away. Tried to scream.

Nearly choked on the hard round metal barrel of a gun digging into the soft skin below his chin. The gun moved when he did and dug into the top of his windpipe. He stopped moving. Opened his eyes. Stopped breathing.

He'd never seen the man sitting on top of him before in his life.

"Shut up and listen or I'll blow your head off."

Staring up into blue eyes that looked about a thousand years old, Doggett believed him. Unable to reach his own gun, unable to cry out for help, and being at heart a pragmatist, he did what he had to do. He shut up and listened.

His submission must have pleased his captor, because the man nodded shortly and eased up enough with the barrel of his gun so that Doggett could breath. Then he made an awkward-looking incredibly fast movement that ended with his left arm lying across Doggett's throat in place of the gun. He nearly choked again. The arm was hard as a plank. It also wasn't real. Some kind of prosthetic. Heavier than hell.

"I need your help. We have to extract an undercover agent from an assignment that has gone wrong before he's lost to us."

The man stared intently down at Doggett. Doggett stared right back up at him. The weight increased over his Adam's apple for a moment, then eased off. Doggett got the message and lightened up on the kill-threat he could feel shining out of his own eyes. Working his throat to get enough spit in his mouth to speak, he forced out, "You CIA? DOD? FBI?" Not that he thought the guy was, but anything could and had happened so far since he'd been in the X Files. It was a strange way to request interagency assistance but not unheard of.

A nasty little smile played across the man's face before disappearing. "FBI. Once."

Doggett wondered what that meant, but didn't ask. He had a feeling the man wouldn't tell him anyway, and he didn't have the air to waste on useless questions. "Who's this agent? What assignment?"

"Mulder," the man answered calmly, shocking the shit out of Doggett. "He was my partner. Once." He stopped and Doggett stared up at him for another little while, putting the pieces together from the background files he'd memorized.

"Krycek." It wasn't a question. The man nodded anyway. The weight against his windpipe eased further when Doggett didn't try to move.

"Are you in?" Krycek was staring at him hard enough to scorch him. Doggett had the strangest feeling that if he said no, not only would he miss the best chance he'd had so far at retrieving Mulder, but he wouldn't live past getting his mouth closed over the word. Then another thought struck him.

"Mulder's dead." He knew. He'd seen the body. He'd been having a nightmare about seeing that very body when Krycek had woken him up.

Krycek was shaking his head. "Not Mulder."

"I saw him," Doggett insisted, glaring up at him. Krycek shrugged, cutting off Doggett's air for a moment then courteously lifting his prosthetic up before oxygen deprivation caused Doggett to black out.

"You know there are shape shifters out there. You've seen one pass for Scully. You've seen one pass as yourself. This one was passing as Mulder."

Doggett thought it over. Stranger things had actually happened. He swallowed. Krycek pressed down.

"You in, or out?"

This time Doggett had no doubt just what 'out' meant. He nodded as best he could with the obstruction under his chin.

"In," he croaked.

The plan that followed sounded like something out of one of those sixties science fiction stories Asimov used to print that Doggett read as a kid. Beam up to the hostile spacecraft, infiltrate the hidden laboratory, rescue the fair princess. Of course it was Mulder, so it'd be a fair prince this time. If they pulled it off. If he wasn't sitting in his shorts in his bed with a gun in his face being fed a fairy tale by a one-armed raving lunatic. When Krycek finished his calm recitation of measured insanity, Doggett asked, "When?"

"Now," Krycek told him. Then he climbed off Doggett and put the gun in a holster at the small of his back.

Doggett rubbed his throat, then climbed out of bed. He looked at the fine wool blend material of his suit, then tossed it back on the chair and reached into his bag for a sweatshirt and jeans. While he was dressing, Krycek dug through a small black bag beside the bed. He pulled out two semi-automatic machine pistols, extra clips of ammunition, four Glocks, several knives, and what looked like a couple of ice picks on steroids.

Tucking his feet into his shoes, Doggett didn't ask. He just reached over and helped himself to some of the armament. Krycek didn’t say anything. He didn't try to stop him, either. "What I wouldn't give for some phasers," Doggett muttered. He didn't realize he'd said it out loud until Krycek agreed with him.

"Transporter'd be nice right about now, too. As it is, we'll have to do the next best thing."

Doggett looked askance at him. Krycek gave him a disconcertingly toothy grin, looking more like a shark than a human being.

"Sneak in the back door."

Something about the way he said it made Doggett think it was Krycek's preferred means of ingress. Trudging back into the woods for the umpteenth time since he'd gotten there the previous night, Doggett grimly fought back his fatigue and kept his eyes peeled. What they reported nearly had him heading back to the motel to stick his head under the pillow. The men, if they could be called that, who met him and Krycek deep in the woods looked like something out of one of Grimm's scarier tales.

They were five big guys, built like linebackers, all of them blond-headed and broad-shouldered. They also all had their mouths and eyes sewn shut. It made Doggett's skin crawl. Another man stepped out from behind them, and Krycek brought his gun up. Instinctively Doggett backed him up, covering as many of the sewn-up men as he could. On second glance, he recognized the man as the one Scully had identified as Jeremiah Smith, some kind of healer, or so Mulder claimed. He was also able to look like Doggett. The thought made his skin crawl as much as the sewn-up guys did, if not more.

"You ours or theirs?" Krycek asked.

Didn't make any sense to Doggett, but Smith seemed to know what the hell Krycek was talking about, because he smiled and replied, "I live to resist."

Hell of a code phrase. Whatever **that** meant, Krycek relaxed, and grinned that death's head grin of his again. Smith smiled back, looking like a benign grandfather. Doggett didn't trust that grin any more than Krycek's.

"Moving out," Krycek said quietly, and they did just that. The sewn-up guys fanned out and took positions behind Krycek.

Doggett wondered how in God's name they could see with their eyelids stitched together like that, and flashed on a memory of his son's face. The shudder that gave him nearly knocked him over. Krycek glanced over at him, but he studiously ignored the curiosity there and headed determinedly onward to who-knew-what.

He didn't see anything but dirt and rocks and a little scrub grass, but the sewn-up guys paused and seemed to crouch without actually bending their knees. Smith hunched his shoulders up and inched closer to Krycek. Doggett looked over at Krycek and nearly shot him from sheer surprise.

The clear blue eyes that had been inches from his, so he **knew** they were blue, were now a strange inky black. They looked truly unearthly. Doggett bit down on his lip to keep from babbling stupid questions, and clenched his fist to keep from drawing his gun and shooting Krycek. He didn't know what it was that was showing in the other man's eyes, but he knew instinctively that it was bad business, and he wanted to eradicate it. His instincts were screaming at him full-bore, and it took every one of his years of experience to keep hold of the shreds of his self control.

Life was weird and getting weirder all the time.

The air shimmered around him, and suddenly the night was brighter than daylight. Doggett squinted but couldn't see where the light was coming from, then looked up and gaped when he realized it was coming from above them.

Way above them.

From a ship.

Krycek hadn't been kidding.

He also wasn't insane. At least not about this.

The ship was goddamned massive. Football fields long. Stories tall. Tons heavy, or at least that's what the air felt like around him, pressure building beneath it where they were standing until his eardrums ached. He glanced over and saw the same dirt and rocks he'd seen before, but now they were shimmering, like the flight line seen through jet exhaust. He blinked.

His stomach lurched.

They moved.

"Beam me up, Scotty," he heard Krycek crack very quietly, and he looked over to see the striations of black swirling through the blue eyes. It made his stomach lurch all over again. Then Krycek was moving, and so were the sewn-up guys, and so was Smith, and so was he. Training snapped into place, and he stalked forward on the balls of his feet, one hand going to the trigger of the semi-automatic strapped around his neck, the other to the hilt of the knife at his waist.

A little wrinkled gray guy who looked like an extra in a Spielberg film came around the corner. One of the sewn-up guys had a knife in his hand and the gray being's head was severed with a single stroke. Doggett blinked again.

The second gray man who came along got the same treatment. From Doggett.

The third person they saw was a woman, and Krycek reacted to her before the rest of them even saw her. Her eyes were completely black, not swirling like Krycek's. She opened her mouth, and it looked like her eyes started to glow, then Krycek's knife took her at the top of the throat right below the chin, right where he'd been aiming his gun at Doggett when Doggett woke up. Krycek lowered her corpse silently to the deck. Something that looked like forty weight motor oil started to seep out of her. One of the sewn-up guys stepped forward and thumbed the trigger on a tube-shaped weapon.

It was a miniature flame thrower. The oil burned fast. Krycek reeled. Doggett caught him and held him up, wondering what the hell'd just happened. Krycek's eyes were sparkling, a thin red-gold line running over the surface of them. Then the flames on the oil burnt out, leaving a stain on the floor, and the shimmer died from Krycek's eyes. He took a shaky breath and pulled away from Doggett.

"You're welcome," Doggett whispered to his back. If Krycek heard him, he ignored him.

Faster than he expected, subjectively several hours later, they made it to what looked like an autopsy bay. There were four stations in it, with chairs that resembled modified dentists' chairs, if the dentists were the kind they talked about in Little Shop of Horrors. Because that was what it was -- a horror shop. Three of the four chairs were occupied. There was blood dripping off the hands and feet of each of the three bodies. One was a woman and two were men.

The second man was Mulder.

For a heartbeat, Doggett knew they were too late. Nobody could go through what these people had gone through and survive. He'd seen tortured prisoners before, but nothing like this. It was truly inhuman.

Two of the sewn-up men had moved forward and were flanking the chair in a defensive position. Krycek walked to the head of the chair behind Mulder and leaned over him. The black swirls in his eyes were moving frantically. His body was shaking. He was biting his bottom lip so hard there was a thin line of blood trickling down over his chin.

He looked like he wanted to scream or kill something. Maybe both.

Reaching a hand out to the apparatus stretching the left side of Mulder's face, Krycek got a look of intense concentration on his face. The concentration twisted into agony as he laid his fingers against the metal spikes. Doggett leaned closer.

Krycek was sweating oil. At least, that's what it looked like. The fluid on his skin looked like the stuff that had come out of the woman he'd killed, but diluted and adhering to the surface of his skin. It touched the framework around Mulder's face, and with a metallic whirring sound, the spikes retracted. Mulder's face smoothed out, and blood flowed from the puncture wounds the spikes left behind.

Not for the first time that night, Doggett wanted to vomit. His training and self discipline held, barely, and he swallowed hard. Several times.

Then a miracle happened. He didn't know how else to describe it. Smith stepped forward beside Krycek, and reached out his hands to cradle Mulder's head in them. A look of intense concentration passed over his face, then he smiled that grandfather's smile again. When he took his hands away, the bleeding had stopped. A lot of the bruising was gone.

The puncture wounds had healed.

Doggett stared, unable to help himself. Smith walked a little unsteadily from Mulder's head to his side and laid his hands gently on Mulder's belly. Doggett could actually see the parched gray surface of the skin flush with blood. For the first time since they caught sight of him, Doggett believed that it was Mulder on that chair, and not Mulder's corpse.

Krycek suddenly swayed on his feet. His eyes were all black, then striped again. "Hurry. They're coming."

He gritted his teeth and touched what looked like the control panel of the device, attached to the side of the chair. There was a rending noise, and Mulder's body sagged. Doggett reacted by rushing forward and catching Mulder before the man slid in an unconscious heap to the ground. Lifting him as gently as he could into a fireman's carry, he headed back the way they'd come in.

"What about the rest of these people?" he asked as he passed by the woman's chair. She looked as dead as Mulder had.

"No time," Krycek told him through clenched teeth. He looked like he was in a lot of pain, and might pass out at any time.

"We can't leave them," Smith protested. He was rocking on his feet even worse than Krycek.

"We have no choice," Krycek gasped out, then grabbed hold of Doggett's arm with his right hand and yanked him toward the door.

The trip back to the door, or the portal, or whatever the hell it was they'd come through, was a worse nightmare than the trip in had been. They made no attempt at stealth, just speed. Doggett kept his head down and his burden balanced. Krycek took the lead, Smith staggered along in their wake. The five-man team of sewn-up guys took out their little portable flame-throwers and proceeded to toast every living being that got in their way.

The other side had them, too.

Finally Krycek sagged against a wall and placed his hand over what looked like a bubble in the metal. The light passed through them again. The last thing Doggett saw of the ship was two of the sewn-up men, caught in the blast of the aliens' fire. Going up in flames.

They didn't need mouths to scream.

Doggett knew that sound would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. Which, if they didn't get their asses in gear, would be very short. Then the light flashed brighter than his eyes could stand. They shut involuntarily, and when they opened again, he was standing in the middle of a field in Montana, an alien healer on one side of him, an alien human on the other, and the naked deadweight of Fox Mulder draped over his shoulder. There was only one thing he could do.

Run.

 

He knew it would hurt. After the peasants had chopped his arm off in the middle of the forest in Siberia, Krycek had thought he knew what pain was. Hell, before that, stranded in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota, puking black fire from his eyes and his gut and his nose, he'd known what pain was.

He'd had no idea what pain could be until he harnessed the alien within him and forced it to kill its brethren.

The Oil Aliens were a true conscious collective, something he'd known in the abstract before he'd forced the remnants of it within himself to get them aboard that Ship. When the woman had died it hadn't hurt. It had disoriented him, as he suddenly saw through two sets of eyes. Himself, seeing her, as he killed her. Her, seeing him, as she died. But it hadn't hurt.

When the Resistance fighter torched the escaping Oil Alien, every atom of it inside him howled in agony. Fire had raced through his blood, along his bones, melted his eyes. The world had tilted and crashed, and if it hadn't been for Doggett he'd have passed out cold. Then the fire had died out, leaving only the echo of pain behind, and he'd been able to go on with the mission.

Find Mulder.

If it hadn't been for the whisper of knowing that he felt when he saw Mulder, he'd've thought the man was dead. But there was a residual tinge of the Oil Alien's presence in Mulder, too, and it sang of a thin thread of life barely sustained. Krycek had moved forward instinctively, fighting the demand of the alien in his mind that he surrender, and stared down at Mulder. Demanded, in turn, that it show him how to release his ally.

The pain flared anew, but it obeyed him. He'd felt like he was sweating blood as he forced it to his will. The machinery responded to the resonant command of the Oil Alien, and withdrew from Mulder. By the time it did, Krycek was nearly unconscious from strain. He barely had strength to beckon Smith over. As the Shifter healed Mulder enough to get him mobile and keep him from dying during the escape, Krycek felt an echo of that healing touching him as well. The remnants of the Oil Alien, held in place at the molecular level by the inoculation and barely contained by Krycek's will, wailed a crescendo of denial as they lurched back through the ship, killing everything that got in their way. Every host body that died he inhabited; every Oil Alien that was incinerated was another firestorm to survive.

By the time they made it back through the transference beam to the field, he was an inch from keeling over unconscious. He threw a pie-eyed look at the tattered remains of his rescue party. Three of the Resistance fighters hadn't made it. The other two were fading back into the anonymity of the forest. They would look after themselves. Smith was so gray with exhaustion he resembled a Gray, only taller, with hair. Doggett looked like he was in shock. Mulder was unconscious. Krycek's brain refused to function.

Thankfully, Doggett's instincts took over. He settled Mulder firmly on his shoulder, gave a grunt like a shot-putter and started running. It was closer to a controlled stagger than an actual run, but the intent was crystal clear. It sparked the self-preservation instinct that was never far from the surface in Krycek and he began a weaving run in Doggett's wake.

At the edge of the woods, he caught up with Doggett and managed to grab hold of the back of his shirt, pulling him to a stop. They nearly overbalanced. Krycek looked around.

Smith had disappeared.

Muttering curses in Russian under his breath, Krycek consigned the Shifter to the devil and got back to the problem at hand. Namely, Doggett, in full-on Marine rescue mode of 'run until you drop and pray the choppers make it in time'; Mulder, not dead, which was the best that could be expected; and himself, so far gone he was practically having an out of body experience. The way his body felt, that might not be a bad idea. He shook his head and concentrated harder.

"Gotta get away from here."

Doggett opened his mouth to protest. Before he could say a word they were distracted by a car pulling up in front of the compound, joining the rental Taurus that was already there.

Scully. Driving herself. Krycek grinned despite himself. The sedative must have worn off. Doctor Scully wasn't one to stay in a hospital a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Sometimes even when it **was** necessary it took restraining straps to keep her down.

"Our job just got a lot easier," he whispered to Doggett, who still had his mouth hanging open. Krycek sighed. At least Doggett wasn't balking. Even when he was in so far over his head he'd drowned and hadn't realized it yet. "C'mon."

Doggett gave him a dirty look, and Krycek wondered for a split second if he'd said his thoughts out loud. Then he played back what he'd said and the way he'd said it. His grin widened. So he'd sounded like he was calling the dog. Wasn't his fault the guy was sensitive.

Keeping an eye out for anyone who might be watching, Krycek led the way across the clearing between the forest and the cars. Slipping into the main room, he saw Skinner, standing at parade rest between Scully and the records room. He cleared his throat.

"Brought you something," he said sweetly.

Scully turned on her heel. Skinner stepped forward, just in time to catch Mulder as Doggett tried to lower him to the ground and lost his grip. Tough being a short guy carrying six foot plus of deadweight, even for a short guy in good condition.

"My god," Scully whispered, dropping to her knees beside him and touching his face.

Skinner looked at Doggett, then over at Krycek. Before he could ask any of the thousand questions that were jostling for position on the tip of his tongue, Krycek raised a hand.

"We've got to get out of here. It's not safe."

For once, nobody argued.

Several hours down the 15 and the 90 with one break in Three Forks for bottled water and they were in Billings. Krycek slept through most of it. Scully had taken up two thirds of the back seat with Mulder's head in her lap, assessing damage and providing triage as best she could. She kept muttering under her breath about miracles. Doggett took the passenger seat and stared out the window. Krycek watched his face in the reflection in the glass for awhile, and saw him fall asleep less than half an hour into the drive. Skinner hunched over the steering wheel like a man possessed, eyes on every mirror, foot steady on the peddle. Before he went to sleep, Krycek wormed his hand along the back of the seat between himself and Mulder until his fingers met Mulder's. He refused to admit that he was holding hands halfway across the state of Montana. But he did sleep better when they were touching.

For once, it was one of Doggett's friends who turned out to be a doctor who had a clinic, instead of one of Scully's. Nobody protested. In the face of Scully's determination, nobody would have the guts, not to mention the fact that no one wanted to lose Mulder again now that they had finally found him.

As they were moving Mulder from the back seat to the stretcher at the emergency entrance, Scully noticed that Krycek was holding his hand. It was a little tough to miss. Mulder wouldn't let go.

Neither would Krycek.

She stared at him for a second, then reached over and took Mulder's other hand. Mulder didn't let go of her, either.

They masked the fact that they were holding on for dear life by flanking the stretcher as the doctor and his intern wheeled it into the small emergency bay. Then the opportunity was taken away from them as a four-person team converged on Mulder, shifting him from stretcher to examination table. Scully and Krycek were pushed away from the bustle around the table.

Scully hovered in the background as the team worked, expression intent as she followed the rapidly flying medicalese. Krycek stepped back and found himself next to Skinner. The AD was looking at him as if he didn't know whether to arrest him, shoot him, or pat him on the head. With a hammer. Krycek shrugged off the attitude and stepped away to look through the window at Mulder.

He was alive. He was safe, for the moment at least. There was still a fight ahead of them, but there would be another way to win it. Mulder wouldn't survive another round with the Grays.

Krycek wasn't sure he would, either.

Glancing over his shoulder, he noted that Skinner and Doggett were deep in conversation. Well, Skinner was deep in conversation; Doggett looked like he was in a coma with his eyes open. Scully had her head buried in a chart along with the doctor. Mulder was blessedly alone.

Krycek slipped into the room. Keeping a weather eye on the door, he turned his back to the window, placing himself between any watching eyes and Mulder. Unable to resist, taking his chance where he found it as he always did, Krycek leaned down and placed a single kiss against Mulder's mouth. It was supposed to be soft. After all, the man's lips were cracked and he'd just been rescued from hell.

It was hard. Deep, open lips and desperate tongue, and over much too fast. Krycek opened eyes he hadn't realized he'd closed to see clear hazel eyes staring right back at him. He managed a crooked smile.

"Good work," he whispered. The corner of Mulder's mouth turned up in a shadow of his usual snide smirk.

"Not my best, but I'm workin' on it." His voice sounded like rusty nails and broken glass. Krycek managed not to wince. Then he looked more closely.

Mulder was sleeping like a baby. Not unconscious this time. Simply sleeping.

Krycek couldn't have stopped the grin that spread over his face on pain of death. Leave it to Mulder. He usually passed out after sex, but if a kiss was good enough, who was he to argue? He laid a finger gently against the center of Mulder's lower lip, then ran it over the places where Smith had healed the puncture marks on his cheek. It was enough. For now.

Turning to leave the room, he almost tripped over Scully. She completely ignored him, all her attention focused on Mulder. As it should be. Krycek managed to mute the beam on his face to a more neutral expression and walked over to where Skinner now stood, standing in the doorway, staring at Scully fussing over Mulder.

"I know you have only Mulder's best interests at heart," Krycek said in a conversational tone. "And if any pressure might happen to be put upon you to give him up," his hand dipped into his pocket and drew out a small metal box. He made sure Skinner saw it. "Death is always an option."

Skinner growled at him. "I won't do anything to hurt Mulder. For god's sake, Krycek - "

"No," Krycek interrupted him, keeping his voice steady and low. "His. And yours."

"I will do nothing to hurt Agent Mulder," Skinner rasped at him through his teeth. "Regardless of **any** pressure applied to me. By **anyone**." He looked pointedly at Krycek.

That was also enough. For now.

Skinner, huffing slightly under his breath and looking like he wanted to punch a hole in the wall -- or through Krycek -- stalked into Mulder's room and stood at Scully's shoulder. Standing sentry. Krycek glanced over at Doggett, further down the corridor, listing slightly to port but in essentially the same position. What was it with Marines? Krycek shook his head and walked over to stand in front of Doggett.

Before he could say a word, Doggett snapped out of the fugue state of exhaustion he was in and glared at Krycek. In a voice that could define gravel, he barked, "I want some answers."

Krycek gave him his best innocent look, a surprisingly good one considering his soul-deep absence of anything resembling innocence. "You got what you wanted, John. He's returned, and he's alive. The past didn't repeat itself."

The glare didn't diminish one whit. "What the hell just happened?"

Beneath the demand was a bedrock of bewilderment. Krycek could relate. He just hid it better. Making a snap decision, he told Doggett, "Follow me," and turned on his heel to head for the parking lot.

"Where?" Doggett asked plaintively from behind his left shoulder. Krycek looked back at him.

"How bad do you want the answers?" Then he turned back and kept walking. After a second, Doggett followed.

Of course.

 

He hadn't the faintest idea what the hell Krycek was going to do next, so when the man led them directly to a Motel 6 and registered them under Doggett's name, it didn't surprise him as much as it probably should. "How'd you know where to go?" Idle curiosity. He was too tired to care.

"I know a lot of things," Krycek told him carelessly, brushing past him and walking toward the front window. He cased the street without letting it show, and Doggett was impressed in spite of his dislike. He didn't know where the guy had gotten his training, but he was good.

Then Krycek posed in the window. There was no other word for it. It was subtle, but it was there. He paused for a second, profile to the glass like a movie star going for a head shot, then stripped off his coat.

Then he unbuttoned his shirt. Left it hanging open and stroked across his chest with his hand. Doggett saw the whole show reflected in the glass.

He could feel his jaw starting to drop, and forcibly closed it, wincing as he nipped his tongue. Instincts kicked in, but not the ones he expected. Instead of stalking over to the window and chucking Krycek through it, Doggett closed the door and locked it. Then he stood there and watched.

The kid was a born exhibitionist. Doggett didn't know who Krycek was performing for, but at the moment he didn't care. He also couldn't drag his eyes away, and he had no idea why. In the next moment, Krycek casually unbuckled his belt and turned to face him.

A surge of arousal shot from Doggett's heels to his scalp, stopping for a quick electrification of the groin area along the way. He nearly died of heart failure from pure shock.

He had to try twice before he could talk, and when he did his voice was barely above a whisper. "What the hell was **that **all about?"

Krycek shrugged, looking perfectly at home in his skin. Just as well one of them was, since Doggett was about to jump out of his. "Cover," Krycek told him. Then he walked over to Doggett, moving like a streetwalker on a mission, and said under his breath, "Follow my lead."

Doggett had to lean forward to hear him. Which left him wide open and vulnerable as Krycek caught him around the neck, swung him around so they were both framed in the window even though they were further back in the room, and kissed him.

With deliberate carnal intent.

He went into shock for the second time in as many minutes. Especially since instead of knocking Krycek on his ass, like he no doubt should've done, Doggett found himself kissing him back. The shock was compounded not only by his own actions but by his physical response. He was liking this kissing gig. A lot.

Well, it **had** been a long time since the divorce. And he was so tired he was punch-drunk. He couldn't be held accountable for his actions.

Especially when a hard-on was an autonomous response to stimuli that didn't rely on logic to begin with.

Feeling a little better with this internal justification, Doggett stopped thinking and returned measure for measure on what was rapidly becoming one of the nastiest kisses it had ever been his pleasure to share. He was so caught up in tongue and teeth and lips and heat that he didn't really notice they were moving until the side of his knee bumped the edge of the mattress.

Reality broke through the haze of lust. He finally came to what was left of his senses and balked. "What-the-fuck?" All one word. Pure Bronx. Krycek grinned maniacally at him, but let him go. Doggett stood there and swayed. Felt like the only thing holding him upright was the weight of his boner. Certainly wasn't his knees, because they were mush, and it wasn't his brain, 'cause it had exploded.

"You and Mulder have more in common than you might think," Krycek informed him, voice as shaky as Doggett felt. That helped. A little. Before he could decide whether to be honored or insulted, considering the source, Krycek broke his train of thought into itty bitty pieces and scattered them all over the track by the simple action of reaching over with his index finger and tracing it around Doggett's mouth.

Not fucking possible for such a small touch to feel so big and shut him up so completely.

"You're in the vanguard now," Krycek continued, his voice now depressingly steady. "Protecting the future of humanity. Are you up for the job?"

Nothing, but none of this shit, made any sense. Not him, not Krycek, not everything that had happened in the last day and a half. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" God. He sure hoped that hadn't sounded as much like a whine outside his head as it had inside.

Krycek seemed to take it at face value. He shrugged, grinning lopsidedly, with an edge that Doggett didn't trust. "For the time being, keep your mouth shut. When we need you, you'll know."

A flare of anger almost displaced the horniness still running rampant through Doggett's body. Almost, but not quite. He concentrated on it, trying to ignore the rest of his reactions. "I s'pose you'll tell me?" Good. Sarcasm was good. Kept him from tackling the guy and doing all kinds of things he wasn't sure he actually knew how to do.

Then Krycek reached over and touched his mouth again. Irritation gave up the fight in the face of pure unadulterated want.

"You'll know," he repeated softly. He turned and, before Doggett could say a word, disappeared out the door.

Leaving Doggett, dead tired, totally confused, completely pissed off and more turned on than he could remember being in months, staring after him with his mouth tingling and his balls tied in knots.

Giving up thinking as a bad deal, he wearily stripped off and dropped his clothes on the floor, falling over sideways to land on the bed. His last thought before he surrendered to sleep was, 'Situation normal since joining the X Files -- all fucked up.'

For the first time in weeks, he didn't have any nightmares. For the first time in longer than that, he woke up with the sheets stuck to his belly. He told himself he didn't remember his dreams and he didn't want to.

Going in and writing up the report on Mulder's return would actually be a relief compared to analyzing **those** dreams.

 

The pain had stopped. That was the foremost thought dominating Fox Mulder's mind. For the first time in so long in felt like forever, the pain was gone.

He opened his eyes and saw a face he hadn't seen in months. Jeremiah Smith smiled down at him, then reached out a hand and touched his chest. The touch was warm, then cold, chilling him down to his bones.

"What are you doing?" he mumbled, eyes widening with fright.

Smith leaned closer. His lips parted, but no sound came out. Staring at his mouth, Mulder could see tiny stitches keeping the internal flesh closed tightly. He didn't know what to say, what to do.

"I'm on your side," he tried to force past lips rapidly going numb. All that escaped was an inarticulate mumble. There was a hissing sound, a jolt against the side of the bed as Smith was pulled away from him, and a flash of what appeared to be gray flesh as an oxygen mask was clamped over his mouth and nose. He threw his arm over his eyes, instinctively avoiding any gas that might escape.

When he opened them, Smith was gone. Smoke rose from a burnt patch in the carpet.

He was alone in the room.

Staring at the space where his attacker had stood, Mulder's thoughts chased themselves in circles. That had been a Resistance fighter, he was sure of it. Almost sure, because while his mouth had been sewn closed, his eyes had been open. Who had killed him? Another Resistance fighter? A collaborator? A bounty hunter? Whose side did they think Mulder was on?

Whose side **was** he on?

He didn't close his eyes for hours. The already complex maze of his life had just added a few layers. He didn't know any more who the bad guys were, who the good guys were, who was the cannon fodder. He pulled the oxygen mask slowly off his face and nestled against the pillow, staring at the ceiling.

He didn't know who he was. What he was doing. Who he could trust. What to believe. A smile crept over his face.

It was good to be home.

_finis, story and series_ __


End file.
